The Hal­low

Out­side of the Lep­rechaun series, Irish mythol­o­gy has been rather under­served by genre-inclined film­mak­ers. With his debut fea­ture, back­woods hor­ror The Hal­low, direc­tor and co-writer Corin Hardy goes some way to try­ing to rec­ti­fy this, even if the end result isn’t com­plete­ly suc­cess­ful, nor as psy­cho­log­i­cal­ly res­o­nant as the best of legends.

Mov­ing his wife Clare (Bojana Novakovic) and baby son Finn from Lon­don to a remote mill house by Irish wood­lands, Adam (Joseph Mawle) is tasked by his employ­ers to sur­vey the local forests for land clear­ance, much to the cha­grin of the unfriend­ly locals (Mawle’s Game of Thrones alum­ni Michael McEl­hat­ton) and a one-scene police­man (Michael Smi­ley, deliv­er­ing trail­er-ready expo­si­tion with gus­to). They think the family’s tres­pass­ing on the sacred ground of fairies, ban­shees and freaky fun­gi will only spell doom and gloom, and they’re soon enough proved right.

Demon­ic forces come bump­ing in the night, and scep­ti­cal Adam him­self becomes a phys­i­cal embod­i­ment of the clash between civil­i­sa­tion and super­sti­tion. The Hal­low is at its best dur­ing its sec­ond act, when all hell breaks loose. After the ini­tial may­hem, though, comes a long suc­ces­sion of repet­i­tive, too sim­i­lar scare tac­tics, and a for­ay into body-snatch­ing/ba­by-snatch­ing ter­ri­to­ry that kills much of the built-up momentum.

That said, there’s still much to admire even when there are few frights on offer. With CGI used only spar­ing­ly, there’s an enjoy­able tac­til­i­ty to the ani­ma­tron­ics, make-up and pup­petry used for the squelchy body hor­ror and crea­ture designs, and a few mem­o­rable images, most involv­ing an aflame scythe, endure even in the lag­ging stretch­es. At the time of writ­ing, Hardy is cur­rent­ly attached to direct The Crow reboot, and his skill here with world-build­ing on the design side of things makes that an at least vague­ly entic­ing prospect. Here’s hop­ing that one has a bit more meat to its macabre.