Irish Horror 'Fréwaka' Disturbs with Look at the Generational Trauma of Women [Panic Fest 2025 Review]

When it comes to horror films produced in Ireland right now, filmmaker Damian Mc Carthy (Oddity, Caveat)—justifiably so—gets a lot of the glory. But another who more than deserves to be on everyone’s radar is Aislinn Clarke, whose sophomore feature, Fréwaka, should cement her as a rising talent in Ireland and abroad. Steeped in rich, Irish superstition and bristling with chilling atmosphere, the director’s latest is a haunting slow-burn that looks on in horror at the oppression of women and the endless cycle of generational trauma passed from mothers to daughters.

Shoo’s (Clare Monnelly) mother has just taken her own life. Estranged from the abusive woman, she leaves her fiancé, Mila (Aleksandra Bystrzhitskaya) to deal with mom’s things while she accepts a job as a home nurse for an old woman who has just had a stroke, Peig (Bríd Ní Neachtain). But when Shoo arrives, she discovers a fearful person with trinkets meticulously placed around the house, mirrors covered by blankets, and an ominous red door that the woman claims leads to a house of horror beneath her own home. Peig’s file says she is believed to have dementia, but as Shoo begins to see things and question her own mind, she realizes the old woman may have a reason to fear whoever…or whatever…is in the basement.

​With her first film, The Devil’s Doorway, Clarke observed the oppression of the church and its treatment of women. Fréwaka expands on that theme, looking at the ways in which organized religion creates a cycle of generational trauma for women. Clarke’s latest opens on a young Peig (Grace Collender) in 1973 during the night of her wedding. The music is loud, the guests are cheerful, but the young bride has something more than wedding night jitters. An uninvited group donning wicker masks has arrived with a goat, to which her new husband shrugs off as tradition (cause for divorce, I say). Fast-forward to the present, and Shoo’s mother (Tara Breathnach)—a religious woman so devout she has a glow-in-the-dark Mother Mary—hangs herself to the tune of a melancholic twist on an Irish melody. Rather than cut away, Clarke holds on the image as the opening credits roll to establish that Frewaka is, in every sense, a grim, unforgiving story about generational trauma. Shoo’s mother burned her for screwing up her prayers like an Irish Margaret White. Peig carries scars on her back from the cult that we learn kidnapped her on her wedding night. Women who have lived a life of pain and wear their trauma on their flesh.

Fréwaka digs deep down into the bones and makes them ache. Shoo and Peig—both played with stirring performances from Monnelly and Neachtain—share a touching bond over the punishments they have experienced in life. But Peig fears the worst is yet to come. As she explains, birth, marriage, death…they are all women’s work, “thin places” that attract “them”. And Shoo will soon be married, herself. Shot with impeccable framing, cinematographer Narayan Van Maele enhances the paranoid dread these women feel all throughout. They often appear far away in frames that create a constrictive box around them, alone in their terror. Between mentions of “punished children of Eve” and stark images of the red cross Shoo would be locked in a closet with seared into her eyes, Clarke heavily implies an abusive relationship between these women and the church. Religion has deemed them as nothing more than mothers, caretakers, prisoners. They can neither escape nor ignore the mental and physical trauma that has been wrought against them, and not a moment in Fréwaka passes without Clarke matching their mental anguish with a sinister tone that traps the audience with these women in their psychological prison.

Like any psychological horror film, Fréwaka exists in a state of percolating dread and confused paranoia. Clarke excels at disturbing the audience, but it’s easy to get lost in all the murky lore. The wicker-basket wearing cult, beings who disappear into thin air, the ominous red door that Peig claims leads to what might as well be Hell…the filmmaker isn’t interested in getting into the details of any of that. Instead, these pieces all act as mysterious metaphors for the torment Shoo and Peig have experienced in their own minds. I, for one, enjoy a film that makes the audience work for answers, but some may find the vagueness of it all more frustrating than enriching. Just understand that Fréwaka is like a nightmare where everything feels off and not much makes sense because that is the experience of struggling with mental illness.

Steeped in Irish superstition with imagery that chills to the bone—get yourself someone who loves you as much as Clarke loves a pair of bleeding eyes--Fréwaka delivers a disturbing take on the mental health struggles of women and the effects of a society that punishes them for nothing more than having a uterus. Bristling with atmosphere and dread dripping from its pores, Clarke’s sophomore establishes the filmmaker as an exciting talent out of Ireland with a knack for getting under her audience’s skin.

Fréwaka arrives on Shudder April 25th. 

By Matt Konopka