The Beautiful Song of Once: The Review of All You Need is Death

For once I want to start by writing one of those generalist site things that make little sense and also annoy me a bit because they seem to be made on purpose to create a division between potential viewers, but so be it: All You Need is Death it’s not a film for everyone (actually it’s not a film for anyone but for some, yes, I’ll explain later). Do you understand why it bothers me? I’ll speak well of it because I liked it a lot, and if you find it disgusting it might seem like my speech wanted to hide a certain air of superiority, like “ah but if you don’t understand it it’s because you’re not up to it”. No! It’s just a really… strange movie?

Phew, another banality. “Strange” in the sense of deconstructed and hallucinatory, with a flabby backbone let’s say, a film that can be explained almost only through images that in turn are intentionally dreamlike, alienating, psychedelic, suggestive. It is a folk horror, perhaps the most folk horror of all the folk horror films of the last ten and something years in which it seems that the genre has in some inexplicable way returned to fashion. Not a folk horror for mass consumption, of those that “here is a forest, here is a village, here is an ancient tradition, here is the elder who explains the local legends about the terrible gaping demon”; not one of those stories of modern people who wander into a crystallized antiquity and come out with a terrible case of the death plague.

On the contrary, it is a film (almost) entirely set in contemporary non-places, mysterious suburbs, abandoned buildings, and here and there a pub for reasons that I will explain to you shortly. It is a story that speaks of tradition but also of the importance in certain cases of forgetting it and leaving it in the past, because if it manages to invade the present it will be body horror trouble for all the people involved. A matter of secrets buried in the villages of Ulster and rightly so, which also speaks, obliquely, of cultural appropriation and of how mass consumption can pervert folklore with unimaginable consequences. It is explicitly said by a character who, poor thing, has limited screen time for reasons that you will discover if you watch it: the protagonist explains to him that “we have no political intentions” and he replies that “there is nothing that is not political”.

So it’s also a story of women and men and the place that both have in society, or had, in short a story of roots and of people who tear them out of the ground to sell them to the highest bidder. And I’m telling you what I intuited, eh, because as I said before, I don’t want to make it a discussion of “understanding the film or not”: I’m the first one who finished watching it thinking “what the fuck did I just see?”. All You Need is Death it’s a film of cultural anthropology, something that made me want to know things I don’t know, that – maybe not repelled me, but certainly left me with the feeling of having only touched the surface, or a little below. On the other hand, it’s the first film by Paul Duane, a guy who has so far dedicated his career to making documentaries on obscure folk compositions from all over Europe: seeing it made me want to recover his While You Live, Shinewhich is about a musicologist who wanders the remote villages of rural Greece in search of a love song that is thousands of years old and that it is said that only a few local ancients still remember.

It’s also a film written, directed and edited by Duane himself with a budget that I think barely covers a season ticket to Cork City FC’s home games, and as such it has all the flaws and limitations you can imagine, as well as some creative choices that are inexplicable and avoidable to me (such as giving one of the two protagonists, whose real-life surname is “Maher”, an unlikely Russian accent). But who cares: it got under my skin and made me feel uneasy that I rarely find in contemporary horror, so here’s the THEME SONG!

Anna and Aleks, who as I said has an unlikely Russian accent, have a particular hobby. She is a folk singer, he is her boyfriend, but both enjoy, on moonless nights but with lots of beer, going to the most remote pubs in Ireland to listen to old traditional songs – and to record them to then resell them to the highest bidder. I’m serious: All You Need is Death one imagines the existence of an underground circuit of folk music lovers and collectors of old ballads, who meet at night in poorly lit parking lots to exchange tapes for money. There is actually an entire secret society dedicated to this hunt for the good old song, led by a woman who doesn’t tell us the truth and whose name is Agnes.

One evening, Anna and Aleks go to hear Brendan Gleeson’s brother perform in a pub with a GUINNESS AS USUAL sign above it. Then they go to the house of an old man who sings them another song that has almost been lost in the mists of time, and who above all gives them a fascinating piece of information: there is a very old and always very drunk lady who, it is said, is the guardian of an ancient ballad sung in a language that predates the invention of writing, and which has never been transcribed or translated. The opportunity is tempting for our two hunters of folk stuff, also because the singer in question is the extraordinary Olwen Fouéré.

At Mrs. Rita’s house, Anna and Aleks discover that the historic piece is not a normal song: for example, no male has ever been able to listen to it. It has been passed down from mother to daughter for countless generations, with the promise of never transcribing it, of never transforming it into something that anyone with a cassette player can listen to (from this detail you should understand that All You Need is Death is not set in 2024: at one point a character even goes to a public library to get a paper book). It smells very much like a curse, in short, and you don’t need to have seen all the horror movies in the world to imagine that Anna will become the new guardian of the sonnet, and that the evil Agnes will get in the way by breaking the promise she made to Rita and transcribing the piece.

Where one of the many horror films in the world would have played out this premise in the most linear way possible (such as: Anna returns home, starts seeing things, is haunted by a demon, etc.), All You Need is Death takes unexpected directions from the start, and continues to wander in the meanders of its own visions until a resolution that is as hallucinatory as it is understandable when you think back to what the film has said up to that point. Some have brought Lynch (David) into the discussion when describing it, and yes, the grammar is often the same, but in a completely different and absolutely non-American context; there is nothing overseas in All You Need is Deathwhich in fact at times is so Irish as to be almost off-putting.

The real Lynch we need to talk about is Ian, the leader of Lankum who wrote the soundtrack here, a mix of folk pieces, drones, slow and metal guitars and atmospheric synths that alone make up 70% of the film. It never lets go, and is used both to underline the dialogues and to fill the silences; but it is rarely pushed into the foreground, and by remaining in the background it discreetly contributes to increasing the uneasiness. I don’t know what your relationship with folk music is, which I imagine is decisive for the complete appreciation or not of All You Need is Death; I don’t understand anything about it, but it has that effect on me. to touch some stringsso all things considered, certain scenes that were too dark (I can’t say whether due to budget issues or artistic choices), certain moments where you just can’t understand what direction the film is taking, the aforementioned somewhat bizarre choices, I remained paralyzed for an hour and a half – I’d like to say shivering but it’s 35 degrees in the shade.

Of network “yes but so far we haven’t understood what this film is about, WHAT IS THE PLOT?”. The point is that if I started telling you what happens I would end up telling you everything, because All You Need is Death it’s a film with very little rubber in a narrative sense and that creates a density of suggestions and oblique thoughts. It will make you think about music, the power of sung words, the past, legends, how tradition can fade into modernity and what the link is between this last concept and alcoholism; even love, not the romantic kind though, so relax. Or it will make you exclaim “I didn’t understand anything, what the fuck, why did I waste my time?”eh: I don’t want to mislead you or swear on the spirits of my ancestors that you will surely like it. I hope I have written enough words to have made you understand if at least there is the possibility that you might like: in that case, get it somehow, maybe secretly recording it during an evening at the pub.

Quotes that cannot be transcribed

[non si può trascrivere]

IMDb | Trailer

Where to watch All You Need is Death