All You Need is Death

Hidden and ancient worlds clash, as a young couple, part of a secret organization, travel about the countryside on a quest to discover the forbidden knowledge that is contained in old and forgotten songs.

A wedding band by day, and Ethnomusicologists by night, Anna and Aleks chase rumors, hunting for unknown and nearly lost folk music in the Irish countryside. They are part of a secret group that meets in non-descript conference rooms, collecting the secrets and old world knowledge hidden within these songs. They make a little money on the side selling some the rarer variants they find to collectors on the black market. But more than anything else, they want to find a song that is more than rare, a song that is more than unknown, they want to find a song that has never been collected by anyone else, a song that has never been recorded.

A song they call a Source Song.

So, when the rumors reach them that there is an old woman in a small town who can sing a thousand-year-old song that has never been written down or recorded, a song taught over generations from mother to daughter, they immediately begin to chase it down. But when they question the locals, all they do is raise suspicions. At one point, when Anna assures a drunken lad that they aren’t journalists, and that they don’t have any “political” intentions, he replies wryly in the knowning tones of the oppressed:

“There’s nothing that’s not political…”

Now, I don’t know about you, but walking into an old, seemingly empty house, and seeing that it’s full of old marionettes, weathered puppets, and weird dolls is probably one of the biggest red flags you could ever see. Then, on top of that, to find that you’ve been scooped by the boss of your secret group, the vaguely sinister Agnes, and that she has somehow beaten you to the old woman’s house? And finally, to find out that the person you want to interview, an old woman named Rita Concannon, prefers to “conduct their interviews from inside the wardrobe?” Again… all in a house full of old marionettes, weathered puppets, and weird dolls? I don’t know what else to say here, but… this all looks like bad news to me, kids. In fact, if I were a betting man, I’d put good money down on the fact that you’re about to get “effed in the ay,” as the kids used to say back in the day.

But then, I guess if the characters in most horror movies weren’t morons, weren’t absolute slaves to their greed and hubris, then we probably wouldn’t have as many horror movies…

A quick side not, as well as a possible spoiler… but as this scene in the house is unfolding, the fact that the person Anna and Aleks wanted to interview is hiding in the closet, and the fact that Agnes has somehow shown up right before them too, and as I mentioned, the fact that the house is full of creepy puppets, at first, I was positive that Agness was actually just throwing her voice, and that it would turn out that this is actually her house, which is how she beat Anna and Aleks there, and the puppets on the walls are hers, and that this is her ancient song. This is what I was expecting, but then, surprise, surprise, it turns out that Rita is real, and really is sitting in the wardrobe with a bottle of booze, answering their questions.

It’s  really odd misdirection, and I can’t tell if it was deliberate or not.

And if it was, then why?

Anyway, the song Rita knows isn’t in Irish, it’s in some older language, one that predates Irish, from a time long before writing, when there was only oral tradition. As such, it has never been written down or recorded, and Rita warns them that this song should only ever be that, and never anything but. Also, the song is specifically meant for Irish women only to hear. No one else. So Aleks steps outside, and Anna turns off her recorder, because more than anything, they just want to hear the song, to be the first to “collect” it.

Again… slaves to greed.

Also… nothing but red flags here.

The song is about an ancient king who loved a woman who betrayed him, and the punishment that he brought down on her and her lover and their baby, and how it was so evil, the act became a curse, and was twisted into an evil spirit. So, this ancient folk ballad is taboo, known only to one people, and only it’s women, which acts as a kind of prison for the curse. Should someone give it air outside of the hereditary chains that bind it, the chains would be broken, releasing a vicious curse of rage and pain, a force of pure evil. It is a song with no name, but if it did have one, it would be “Love is a knife with a blade for a handle.”

Rita sings it for them in what is probably the best scene in the whole movie, and afterwards, Anna and Agnes leave, somewhat shaken by the strange experience, with Aleks waiting outside for them. It is at this point that we learn that Agness recorded the performance, and that’s that… the pact is broken, the chains are undone.

The curse is free.

The curse first manifests as a kind of smudgey-shadow being. It kills Rita with her own booze bottle, in a very novel way—another place where I am unsure whether this was a deliberate piece of social commentary about Irish drinking culture or not—and leaves her for her grandson to find.

The grandson’s name is Breezeblock Concannon, and not one person in the film even so much as bats an eyelash at this, which is maybe the craziest thing that happens in the entire movie, if you ask me. He is an unimpressive children’s party puppeteer by day, and the broken link in a chain of women that stretches back thousands of years. The pressure that came with Breezeblock having to live with the mistake of his birth, with being the unwanted male at the end of a long line of witches is an interesting, if not underdeveloped bit, where he talks about the bitter neglect from his mother that he grew up with, and the disinterested cruelty Rita always showed him too, as well as the way he was haunted by terrifying apparitions as a child due to his birth having disrupted the line, all culminating in what he finally does to free himself of the spectral attention.

But like I said, in the end, it’s a little underdeveloped.

The curse is also an infection of unsatiable hunger, toxic love, and all-consuming jealousy. Soon enough, it is tearing them all apart. Anna, Aleks, Agnes, and the old Breezeblock too. They’re eating themselves, and each other, literally and figuratively, as the song worms its way inside them, sowing betrayal and murder.

Reminding me a lot of the film A Dark Song, at least in the way that it presents real magic being used by every day people, the references to horror movies like Last House on the Left, Pan’s Labyrinth, and It, amongst others, clearly show us the filmmakers’ horror movie inspiration roots.

But still, it doesn’t quite work, mostly due to the low budget.

The whole set-up is a good idea, one that this little low budget film uses really well, for most the part, but there’s a little too much reliance on the emotional turmoil in the back half, which wasn’t quite earned in the front half. On one hand, the actors really do fine work, but they’re not quite capable of carrying so much dramatic weight, and yes, the characters are all cursed, so the things they’re feeling are all ramped quite a bit, so they’re a little out of control, but there’s a tonal shift in the back half that feels too disconnected from what we have previously seen, and that it’s straining too hard to make those connections.

I did like the illustration of how the act of recording Indigenous culture, taking Indigenous art, specifically for outsider consumption, has unavoidable implications. Yes, it’s usually social and political, instead of supernatural, but still this was a good example of an issue that, to me at least, seems like it isn’t talked about as much, at least, not so directly.

In the end, All You Need Is Death is a little too obvious, a little too belabored, and more than a little hampered by its low budget and somewhat uninspiring visuals, but still, there’s some good stuff here. I’d say that it’s worth watching if you’re intrigued by the premise, just maintain your expectations when you do, because this movie is very much an “almost” film. It’s not bad. It’s not great.

It’s more… almost good.