<em>All You Need Is Death</em> and the Art of Cutting Through Corporate Storytelling

All You Need Is Death opens on a scene we’ve seen a thousand times before: a man is being interviewed about a dead girl. We watch his testimony through the lens of a video camera, we see the grainy footage of people in a bar—the kind of footage that often becomes a de facto Last Known Photograph. Then we cut back to the night in question, months earlier, and fall into an entirely different story, one of ancient songs, unbreakable curses, and tortured loves. By the time we’ve almost caught up with this opening scene, the girl’s death has become an uncanny, impossible act in an unknowable world.

Along the way, each time it reaches a point where it might follow a well-worn path, the film veers in a wild new direction.   

I’m fortunate enough to watch a lot of movies and television shows for work—and I’m certainly not going to complain about that—but there is a point where you wonder if you’ve seen everything. If a movie will ever make you really excited again, rather than just ticking off how well the story playing out in front of you is adhering to or subverting the exact plot points and emotional beats you’ve seen a dozen times this year. But if you’re really lucky, you’ll have a year like this one, where you’ve been genuinely surprised by not one, not two, but four separate films. One of them is Sinners, and the other three are recent independent Irish horrors—and of those, the one I’m imploring you to see as soon as possible (even if it means coming back later to this somewhat spoilery essay) is Paul Duane’s All You Need Is Death.

Paul Duane is an Irish filmmaker, the director of a bunch of shorts and documentaries on a variety of topics, and his debut feature has come out at a time when there seems to be a wave of excellent Irish horror. I’ve been meaning to watch All You Need Is Death since it came to streaming last year (it’s on Shudder in the U.S.) but I finally made time last week, and I am so, so happy I did. I’m also glad I saw Sinners first.

Ryan Coogler’s film has meant so much to Black nerds and horror fans in particular, and the Black community in general—but it was also cool that he included a bit of Irishness in the form of the vampire Remmick, a character bound up in the history of colonization and the importance of holding on to your culture. Coogler manages to simultaneously acknowledge that many Irish immigrants became colonizers and appropriators themselves once they got to America, and also remind the audience that there even was such a thing as “pre-Christian Ireland”. (And on a less serious note, I can’t tell you how much it’s brightened my social media feeds in this Mindflayer of an era to see people remixing “Rocky Road to Dublin”.)

I kept thinking about Sinners while I watched All You Need is Death, which is also about the power of song to cross time—though it comes to a startlingly different endpoint.

In a world where corporations are people and people are brands, where the movie I thought would be a toy commercial only surprised me by being a car commercial instead, where comic book movies require you to do homework to understand them, where directors I used to like bludgeon their past masterpieces with meaningless sequels—this movie, this movie, that was made independently and often seems to have been shot on the sly during off-hours at a construction site, gave me the absolute joy of not knowing what would happen next. Of telling an original story and making me care about it. Of getting a song stuck in my head for days.  

I was also put in mind of David Cronenberg—not in a way that chips at All You Need Is Death’s originality, but simply because its writer-director, Paul Duane, does a similar thing to Mr. Cronenberg. There is a line drawn around this film, and when you cross it you’re in his world, not ours. People use analog recording equipment but have cellphones, sometimes. They smoke everywhere—even in their OBGYN’s waiting room. A young man can be in Ireland as a refugee from Communism, but crossing the border from the Republic to the Northern bit of Ireland doesn’t seem to be a big deal… but also people are wary of being drawn into any form of political conversation.

So it’s not exactly the 1980s, but it’s not exactly here and now, either.

What makes it even more Cronenberg-y is the fact that there’s a secret, dangerous-feeling underworld, but what’s very much Duane’s is that the underworld is a network of incredibly intense folk song collectors. Song collectors are, of course, real, but in this film they seem desperate, and meet in little groups in otherwise-empty schools, hesitantly singing songs they’ve heard for a haughty woman named Agnes (Catherine Siggins) who seems to promise fame, or riches, or something if they can find a song no one’s recorded yet. As she says to the group: “The future is picked clean. Treasure lies in the past. We find beauty where others have overlooked it. then it’s up to you to find the places where a rose springs up from the corpse of times past.”

Which sounds noble—if also kind of nihilistic—but then there’s one point where a character sells a song to a shadowy, clearly extremely wealthy collector in a dark parking lot. This is already hilariously weird, but also kind of implies that some of the people are in this not for nobility, but for that sweet, sweet forbidden folk music paper.

The couple at the center of the film, Anna (Simone Collins) and Aleks (Charlie Maher) seem to have a concrete reason to look for songs—they’re in a decent but lackluster band, performing in echoey community centers. I get the sense that they have many weddings in their past and their future, and that they’d like to expand beyond “Whiskey in the Jar” if at all possible. The two of them want bigger things—whether that’s fame, or a connection to better, more authentic music is at first kind of vague. But aside from that: are they appropriating this music, two circling vultures picking the bones clean? Where is the line between preservation and exploitation? What is music’s inherent value?

But they follow a chain of traditional singers (including Barry Gleeson, a highly regarded folk singer who’s also the brother of Brendan!) until they find Rita Concannon, a woman who supposedly had a song no one else knows.

Did she learn it from her mother, who was known to have old songs? Is it really as ancient as the rumors claim? If it’s so precious, why has no one recorded it yet?

Rita is played by Olwen Fouere, who was wasted in The Watchers, but here gets to do some great, terrifying work in a story that is, kind of, a successful version of what I think The Watchers was trying to be.

Only after kicking Aleks out of the room (the song is not meant to be heard by men) and only after forbidding the two women to record it in any way (Anna makes a slow show of removing her jacket to show she isn’t wired, then taking the batteries out of her tape recorder; Agnes does neither) will Rita sing them the song. And it’s uncanny and fucking upsetting, even before you know what it’s about. Rita tells them that if it had a title, that tile would be “Love is a knife with a blade for a handle” which should give you an idea. It’s a story of a lovelorn Queen, a betrayed King, an unfortunate Lover, and a whole lot of torture, and it’s been passed from mother to daughter since a time before standardized Irish. Even Anna, who speaks Irish, has trouble deciphering it.

Naturally, having heard the secret chord, their lives are dragged into a maelstrom of doom and supernatural powers.

But what’s great about the film is that it doesn’t try to show us most of that, or explain it away, or invent a cosmology or a magic system. Rather than sucking all the mystery out of the film, it digs into its characters, and trusts the actors to show us their obsession and the havoc it’s wreaking on their lives. It’s this choice that takes what might have been a fun midnight movie and turns it into something much deeper.

As with Sinners, a film about songs that make time irrelevant has to put it’s soundtrack where its mouth is. The score and songs for All You Need Is Death are by Ian Lynch of Lankum, who specialize in what I can only describe as gut-churning doom folk—honestly, the murder ballads are the more upbeat moments in the band’s catalogue—in collaboration with frequent Lankum collaborator John ‘Spud’ Murphy.

Here’s Lankum’s take on “The Wild Rover”—close your eyes and listen to this sucker and tell me you haven’t just fallen through a wormhole and are now dying of liver failure on a blasted windswept heath somewhere in the 19^th Century.

Wait come back! You’re not really dying! (I mean, no more than usual.) I need you to read the rest of the essay, I worked hard on this one.

The idea of intense folk song collectors is of course rooted in a reality: if you live in a rural area, and it gets dark early in the winter, and the woods and fields and seas are alive with the sounds of CREATURES, you need a way to create light and warmth. You need to remind yourself that you’re human, and that you’re not alone in the dark. Getting together in a group to sing becomes not just a pastime but a necessity. (We were reminded of this during the pandemic, yes? Or has everyone memory-holed that?) Having a new song, a new story, something no one’s ever heard before, becomes the most important thing in the world for a night… except. The only thing the might be even more important is if you have an old song, an ancient song, one that links you back to your community, to the time before the colonizers, the war, the famine, the flood, the fire, the plague, the drought—whatever catastrophe it is that marks a Before and an After for your community. Whatever it is that all of us are really looking for, underneath everything else.

That thing, I think, is underneath everything else, a longing for a Before Time that can curdle into a desire for an impossible, uncomplicated past, that can lead people to embrace remakes and sequels and chase the lightning captured in a long-shattered childhood bottle, that sends people into echoes of the music that soundtracked their first loves. The reason I paid a man to embed a dead language into my skin with needles and ink.

To be fair, that’s probably the only part of my life my ancestors would understand.

This is the desire that gives folk horror its power. It’s the reason some of us like Ari Aster and Robert Eggers a whole lot, the reason I was entranced by The Devil’s Bath even though I hated actually watching it. If you really engage with it you have to acknowledge that the society we have now is a flimsy illusion. (And really it’s only an illusion for a vanishingly small number us, fewer every day.) Folk horror is a way to try to confront that illusion head on.

What All You Need Is Death does masterfully is taking the connection to a remote past and collapsing any sense of distance. Love was a blade with a knife for a handle a thousand years ago, and it’s still cutting people to ribbons today. The central story of the song is re-enacted by the main characters. They ignore the warnings around the song without even the slightest protest, and the movie doesn’t point at their terrible choices and yell at us to pay attention. There are no ominous music cues, cheesy close-ups, or overhead shots of cars driving through impossibly vast forests. The rules are violated—almost causally—and then the story has them. Everything after that is as inevitable as the notes in a song.

What the film does beautifully is how it plays with that inevitability. I tried to think through this a bit in my review of Bring Her Back—there’s a feeling of inevitability that works for me, and one that’s so overwhelming it deadens my feeling of connection. Which, some people like that precise tone, but for me, I want a sense of play and surprise to exist in conversation with the fates.

By way of example: a tense scene between Rita’s son (who is named Breezeblock—a thing I have not stopped thinking about since I watched the movie—and is played by Nigel O’Neill) and Ron (Barry McKiernan), the man who led Anna and Aleks to Rita. Ron wakes tied to a bed. (Bad!) He’s right next to Rita’s corpse. (So much worse!) But what takes the scene to a new level is Breezeblock standing at the foot of the bed, talking in circles to Ron about the forbidden song, and the spirits that used to torment him for not being born a girl in order to carry it on as his mother had carried it on from hers. There’s a moment where this scene seems about to veer into sexual violence, but it goes in a completely different direction that’s kind of even worse—but still made me whoop with delight.

In a sense the man was ensnared by the song the moment Anna approached him for directions, just as Breezeblock was ensnared by the accident of his birth. But along the way Ron gets a monologue on morality and power:

“There’s nothin’ that’s not political, I’m telling you. Do you know what moral hazard is?” When she demurs that she does not, he explains: “A person doing something—you—decides how risky that particular something might be, but say you’re not the one who’s taking the risk? Say it’s the other fella—me—who’s taking the risk? And the other fella might not even know he’s taking a risk—but you decide that it’s worthwhile, without asking me? That’s moral hazard.”

Breezeblock, who initially seems like a one-note sad sack, is the one who ends up with the best, most stirring line in the whole film. The story at the root of the song is as grim as it gets: the young queen and her lover were tortured for their affair, and finally starved until the lover resorted to eating their baby. But when Anna tries to use it as proof that love isn’t real, Breezeblock refuses her fatalism: “That’s just nature. That’s got nothing to do with love. The old king was trying to tell her that her love was made up, to punish her, I think. But to starve a body ‘til it goes mad—it proves nothing.”

But even that isn’t the point of the film. This isn’t exactly a story of love conquering all, because in the end it goes in an even stranger direction, that opens up a whole other range of possibilities, and lets us know that the story we’ve been watching is only one tiny facet of something much larger and more fucked up—or more beautiful, depending on your point of view.

Paul Duane wrote, directed, and produced this film, telling us a story around a fire, with a team of other artists. The writing and shot compositions and makeup effects and music were all made by human minds and hands doing what humans minds and hands have always done to keep the dark at bay. We’re living in a time made of razors; one wrong move and your humanity’ll be sliced clean off. And the only thing that gets me out of bed in the morning, the only thing that, I hope, keeps me human, is finding work like this that reminds me that art has gotten us this far, and that people still have stories to tell.