The Hallow – Film Review by Stephen McDermott

Director: Corin Hardy
Writers: Corin Hardy (screenplay), Felipe Marino (screenplay) (as Olga Barreneche)
Stars: Joseph Mawle, Bojana Novakovic, Michael McElhatton

The west of Ireland is usually regarded by visitors as having the country’s most picturesque scenery. After Guinness and the Irish peoples’ warm sense of hospitality (™), the landscape of the west is what’s played up most by Discover Ireland in their efforts to attract tourists to the Emerald Isle.

Thankfully Corin Hardy not only avoids such promotional stereotypes when using the setting for his debut feature The Hallow, he inverts them to great effect. For the film’s English protagonists – who’ve just moved to rural Ireland to start a new life – the scenic woodland proves to be a menacing kingdom, while the locals are aloof and hostile.

When conservationist Adam (Joseph Mawle) brings a mysterious black sludge from the forest into his family home, a series of strange events ensues. Of course, when farmer Colm (Michael McElhatton) warns Adam’s wife Claire (Bojana Novakovic) of the dangers the forest poses, he is simply dismissed as a crackpot. Thus terror is allowed to wreak all kinds of havoc upon the young family.

In devising the plot, Hardy draws on elements of Irish faerie mythology and the films of Ray Harryhausen, Dick Smith and Stan Winston (all of whom get a nod in the closing credits). The result is an impressive combination of the stolen-child myth with body-horror and creature feature genres. It’s kind of like Evil Dead or The Thing by way of W.B. Yeats.

Which is not to suggest that the movie relies on tiddly-eye paddywhackery either. One of its biggest successes is the avoidance of stock Irish characters and clichéd representations of ignorant outsiders.

And rather than conforming to an easy bogeyman-type fable, there’s a decent attempt at rationalising the plot’s paranormal elements through pseudo-scientific explanation. While this isn’t entirely successful, it’s not so eye-rollingly daft as to thwart one’s suspension of disbelief the same way leprechauns or fairies would.

It’s unfortunate that The Hallow does, at times, suffer from a lack of scale. One of the film’s glaring drawbacks is its underwriting of secondary characters, and you could probably count on one hand the number of lines spoken by those outside the family. Similarly its use of special effects is nothing spectacular, which does detract from the overall horror a little bit.

At the same time, there are films with ten times the budget of The Hallow that are only a fraction as watchable. The comparatively low production cost of the film doesn’t detract from its overall success, and it should even appeal to those who aren’t usually drawn towards horror. A highly commendable first effort.