A Dark Song (Liam Gavin, 2016)

A good low-budget film can make you forget its financial limitations but a great one revels in it. A Dark Song clearly does not have a huge amount of money behind it, but director Liam Gavin and his myriad impressive collaborators use this to their advantage, with contrasts between frugality and extravagance woven into the very core of the film itself. The film’s moments of sparsity are essential in emphasising the richness that lies at its heart, both formally, thematically and narratively.

The story is deceptively simple: a woman (Catherine Walker) paralysed by grief hires a brutish freelance exorcist (Steve Oram) to lead her through a complex, time-consuming occult ritual so she can meet her guardian angel and ask them for a wish.  But the intensity of A Dark Song stems not from its more fantastic elements that structure it narratively, but from the more banal grunt work the ritual itself demands: the repetition, the humiliation, the doubt and the fear. While never boring, there is a psychic heft, a spiritual weightiness to these repetitive tasks that renders the labour required something very real. In the world of A Dark Song, physical and mental labour are placed on the same plane of endurance as the more emotionally complex challenges and traumas its protagonists face: these are characters quite literally working through things.  

An extraordinarily personal film, A Dark Song feels like a folk tale whispered to you at night while you sleep by person or persons unknown, recalled in vague half-remembered images and flashes of almost incomprehensible truths. Brooding, painful and unapologetically intimate, it is also fundamentally joyous: it is a film that demands a right to offer hope, a light in the dark, a path beyond. 

- Alexandra Heller-Nicholas