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An Taibhse (The Ghost) review: Enigmatic, equivocal and deeply unsettling - SciFiNow

An Taibhse (The Ghost) review: Enigmatic, equivocal and deeply unsettling

John Farrelly’s Irish-language ghost story is an incestuous merger of gothic psychodrama and perverted coming of age.

“What if Alexander follows me here?”, says young Máire Finegan (Livvy Hill) to her father Éamon (Tom Kerrisk) as they travel through darkness on a coach, their faces illuminated by the candle lanterns they are holding. This opening line in writer/director John Farrelly’s An Taibhse (The Ghost) will prove programmatic in more than one way: for not only is it, like all the film’s dialogue, in Irish, something relatively rare in cinema and practically non-existent in the horror genre; but it also immediately ushers in an ambiguous element of the supernatural, or perhaps of the psychological.
For Alexander, as Éamon will immediately, insistently respond, “is not real – I don’t want to hear that name again.” Needless to say, the name will come up again, and on more than one occasion – but it remains unclear whether Alexander is a figment in the over-active imagination of a girl still haunted by the recent death of her mother, or is something more akin to the otherworldly spirit medium Tony who, from the other side, guides and sends premonitions to little Danny Torrance in Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining (1980).

There are further influences from The Shining, even if An Taibhse is set in the previous century. For like the Torrances, the Finegan father and daughter have been hired to serve as caretakers over the winter for a remote estate which, with its 15 bedrooms and bathrooms and its creepy winding corridors, is decidedly hotel-like – and as time passes, Éamon will turn to the demon drink and become a very bad dad, even brandishing an axe, and becoming murderous when a third party (Anthony Murphy) arrives unannounced.

Long before any of this happens, Máire knows something terrible is coming, because Alexander keeps showing Máire impressionistic, dreamlike glimpses of a bloody, blazing future – but in the meantime, as Éamon becomes housebound from an accidentally self-inflicted injury, Máire will find herself exhausted from doing the domestic work of two during the day, and from her father’s demands at all hours for more booze from the cellar, until eventually she will realise that Éamon, increasingly unstable and violent, is no less frightening than the strange nocturnal activities in the house’s shadows, including the repeated materialisation of a Punch puppet and a crimson book from the out-of-bounds librrary.

As its very title would suggest, An Taibhse is a ghost story, with a classic gothic setting – an old mansion exposed to the elements in the harsh midwinter, whose deeply dark interiors resist the muted orange glow of the candlelight, and set the mind aflutter with what might be lurking in the shadows. Máire certainly sees and hears things going bump in the night, and doors creaking open of their own accord – or at least she dreams that she does, with several of the film’s more nightmarish scenes being resolved as our young heroine wakes in her bed. Yet this is also a coming-of-age story, as Máire’s menarche coincides with first blood of other kinds, and a (significantly) red-hued book containing forbidden knowledge keeps appearing. By the end, a rapid montage of images superimposed on each other will suggest a range of clashing, contradictory subtexts for what, during Máire’s bloom into womanhood, is really going on in this house between father and daughter, whether a ghostly incursion, a demonic takeover, or something altogether more grounded and mundane in its taboo nature whose all-too-real horror Máire can only process through self-deluding fugue and a retreat into her evasive imagination.

Reminded once again near the end that Alexander is not real, Máire will respond, “I know, but I wish he was”, as she comes to realise that her wildest childish fantasies are preferable to shocking, shoddy reality, and we might after all have been witnessing not so much an adolescent’s paranormal encounters or psychosexual rites of passage as a damaged girl’s gradual, trauma-tinged blossoming into full and destructive psychosis. Farrelly shuns special effects, instead favouring the purer powers of editing and lighting to elide as much as elucidate the dark secrets of a house haunted more by the living than the dead. The results, though as enigmatic and equivocal as a book whose contents we never actually see, are also deeply unsettling on any reading. For somewhere between the invisible Alexander, the performative Punch and the flesh-and-blood Daddy there is a male figure who, in the eyes of a growing if confused girl, is equally menacing and desirable.

An Taibhse (The Ghost) was shown at Frightfest on 23 August 2024