All You Need is Death: An Untraditional Horror Film About Traditional Music

By Thom Ernst

Rating: B

The title of director Paul Duane's latest film All You Need is Death sounds like a slightly bent take on the old Beatles song. Those familiar with the Beatles ballad might find the initial entry into the film disorienting.

But All You Need is Death has nothing to do with the whimsical life-affirming ditty “All You Need is Love” that Lennon and McCartney have programmed us to expect.

All You Need is Death is a film about folk music minus the labouring expectations to be quaint and quirky. Creepy is a better adjective. The film is an intoxicating journey down country backroads, narrowly lit by car headlights, searching for…a song.

Not since Sergeant Howie (Edward Woodward) eavesdropped on Willow's (Britt Ekland) impromptu performance of a local island tune in The Wicker Man (1973) has a song been infused with such underlying malice. The comparison is helped given that The Wicker Man takes place on a fictional Scottish island while Duane grounds his film on home turf in neighbouring Ireland.

Duane, whose IMDB page reveals a sizable collection of work, does double duty as director and screenwriter. I'm unfamiliar with Duane's work, aside from a couple of episodes of Ballykissangel, but All You Need is Death is a formidable introduction. 

Not surprisingly, Duane's work includes several music videos and music-themed documentaries. It takes little time to connect the dots to an earlier film of Duane's called While You Live, Shine (2018) to take note of the filmmaker's passion for song and music. I've yet to see While You Live — a documentary about a musicologist— which, by the film's description and its decidedly more uplifting title, suggest that All You Need is Death to be a dark and ominous shift in direction.

The film follows a young couple, Anna (Simone Collins) and Aleks (Charlie Maher), who search for and record rare folk songs and then sell them to wealthy collectors. By all rights, a musicologist's job should not be dangerous, but the closer Anna and Aleks get to locating a folk song that's not just rare but taboo, the more strange and perilous things become.

Billed as a horror film, All You Need is Death is in no hurry to play into the genre's traditional tropes. Instead, Duane takes a steady and unnerving path that grows increasingly secluded until Anna and Aleks' potential dangers can no longer be ignored.

All You Need is Death is a film to experience. It requires some work from the audience. An impassive viewer is unlikely to piece together the fragments that make a cohesive whole. This is a film to be discovered, made by a director worth discovering.

All You Need is Death. Directed by Paul Duane. Starring Simone Collins and Charlie Maher. In theatres and on VOD April 12.