‘All You Need Is Death’ Is an Irish Folk Horror Masterpiece

A song is a vessel that houses dreams and desires that are both dead and everlastingly alive, and in All You Need Is Death it’s also a curse about the most dangerous of all emotions: love. A tale of primeval retribution and eternal damnation, writer/director Paul Duane’s feature debut is saturated in sin and fury, both of which are almost as consuming as the amour that devours its protagonists. Knowing just how much to say aloud and how much to suggest through visual and aural means, this superb Irish fable feels at once modern and ancient, and hums with mystery and malice.

Like the most evocative sort of forlorn ballad, All You Need Is Death, in theaters and on VOD April 11, provides enough details to convey its point without spelling everything out in literal fashion. From pub to pub and home to home, Anna (Simone Collins) and her foreigner boyfriend Aleks (Charlie Maher) travel around the Irish countryside playing in a band as well as, more importantly, searching for individuals who know rare folk songs. They’re both historians and hoarders, and there’s something devious about their trade, given that—via a wire cagily wrapped around Anna’s left arm—they surreptitiously record these old tunes. As indicated by a nighttime transaction in a parking lot with a collector, their end goal is cash, which is why they feel compelled to steal these songs without informing their performers. And as with all businesses, there’s considerable market competition for their goods, as a subsequent gathering elucidates.

Following an incident at a bar that’s conveyed through a mixture of real-time action, surveillance camera footage, and police-interview testimonials, All You Need Is Death follows Anna and Aleks to a get-together organized and led by Agnes (Catherine Siggins), an enigmatic woman who encourages people like them to locate and stockpile these coveted compositions. Agnes’ true intentions are deliberately opaque, and yet All You Need is Death nonetheless implies that there’s something malevolently amiss about her and this mission. “Treasure lies in the past. We find beauty where others have overlooked it,” states Agnes, who claims that by turning yesterday into a tomorrow for themselves, they accomplish “a miracle. Modern alchemy.” To conjure such magic, she says to her flock, one must detect where “a rose springs up from the corpse of time’s past."

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