Haunting Irish folk-horror Fréwaka brings Clare Monnelly to Tipperary for Q&A screening

Grief, folklore and the uneasy murmur of the supernatural come together in Fréwaka, the new feature by Aislinn Clarke, screening on Wednesday, October 29, 2025 at 8 p.m in the The Source Arts Centre, Thurles.

Audiences will have the chance to discuss the film afterwards with its lead actor, Clare Monnelly, who will take part in a Q&A session following the screening.

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Tickets are priced at €10 general admission and €5 for Film Club members, available through the box office.

In Clarke’s film, Monnelly plays Shoo, a home care worker shadowed by personal tragedy who leaves her pregnant girlfriend to tend to Peig, a prickly recluse played with brittle intensity by Bríd Ní Neachtain. Peig has locked herself away in a large, decaying house on the edge of a remote village, suspicious of her neighbours and terrified of na sídhe—the sinister beings she believes abducted her on her wedding night many years before.

As the days pass, a strange intimacy grows between carer and patient. Shoo finds herself drawn into Peig’s world of rituals and superstition, the old woman’s paranoia seeping like damp through the walls. In confronting Peig’s fears, Shoo must also face the ghosts of her own past.

The film Fréwaka continues Clarke’s fascination with the intersection of faith, folklore and social history, first explored in her acclaimed 2018 debut The Devil’s Doorway. The Irish Times, in its review, praised the film as “a textured delve into Celtic mythology and intergenerational trauma,” noting its “socially conscious spookery” and deft layering of national scars—Magdalene laundries, coffin ships and blighted fields—beneath the skin of its horror.

Narayan Van Maele, cinematographer of An Irish Goodbye, lends the film its ghostly visual poetry, following Shoo through dark corridors and deserted rural roads. Nicola Moroney’s production design drapes the landscape with ribbons, scissors and other half-forgotten talismans, while Die Hexen’s unnerving electronic score hums with quiet menace.

Monnelly and Ní Neachtain deliver performances of remarkable precision, their uneasy dance of trust and terror holding the film in a taut, spectral balance. Fréwaka leaves its audience poised between worlds—uncertain whether Shoo is trapped by the delirium of an old woman or by a darkness stitched into the Irish soil itself.

In Clarke’s hands, the supernatural feels less like fantasy than a reckoning, whispering that the past is never truly buried, only waiting for someone to dig it up.

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