All You Need Is Death is the kind of film that proves two things very quickly:
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You should never, ever mess with old folk songs.
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If you do mess with old folk songs, you absolutely should not record them, sell them, and then act surprised when reality develops a curse-shaped hole in it.
Paul Duane’s feature debut is a strange, eerie little gem of Irish horror: part doom-folk séance, part ethnomusicology gone to hell, part “what if your artsy side hustle accidentally summoned a thousand-year-old king.” It’s slow, thick with atmosphere, and so committed to its own weirdness that you either tune into its frequency—or feel like you’re listening to a cursed track in the wrong key.
I tuned in. And I am now afraid of ballads.
“We Just Collect Songs” (Narrator: They Did Not Just Collect Songs)
Our protagonists are Anna and Aleks:
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Anna (Simone Collins) is a failed Irish folk singer, which is already a great horror backstory—nothing says “ripe for doom” like thwarted artistic ambition.
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Aleks (Charlie Maher), her Eastern European boyfriend, is her partner in crime as they drive through rural Ireland recording obscure folk songs and selling the audio to collectors behind the singers’ backs.
So: broke. Shady. Pretentious. Perfect horror fodder.
They’re not preserving culture, exactly—they’re strip-mining it for cash. Instead of “respectful archivists,” they’re more like musical organ thieves in a rental car. It’s all very low-key exploitative, which makes it satisfyingly easy to root for supernatural karma when things go south.
And oh, they do.
The Song You Should Absolutely Not Record
They catch wind of an undocumented, thousand-year-old folk song, allegedly passed from mother to daughter for generations. Already, that sentence screams DO NOT TOUCH. But Anna and Aleks hear “rare content” and “big money,” not “ancient curse delivery system.”
The song’s keeper is Rita Concannon, an elderly woman played by Olwen Fouéré, who walks into the film like she already knows she’s the best thing in it. Rita is exactly the kind of person you’d expect to be guarding a reality-warping song: calm, eerie, half in this world and half in another one that does not like you.
The song itself is in Old Irish and tells the story of a king betrayed by his beloved, who then curses her, her lover, and their descendants. That right there is your entire movie in metaphor form: betrayal, obsession, punishment echoing down the bloodline. It’s the kind of story that should stay whispered in kitchens and graveyards, not be dumped onto a WAV file and emailed to a collector named Ron or Carl or whatever.
Naturally, Anna and Aleks record it.
Naturally, that goes about as well as drinking something you found in an unlabeled bottle in a basement.
Ethnomusicology, But Make It Doom
One of the joys of All You Need Is Death is that it treats folk music not as cute, cozy heritage—but as an occult technology. The song isn’t just content; it’s a ritual. Hearing it does something. Recording it does more. Playing it back, sharing it, sending it to collectors: that’s like forwarding a chain email from hell where the fine print is written in curses and teeth.
The horror doesn’t hit with big jump scares. It seeps. Little fractures in reality, unsettling visions, temporal oddities, and the creeping sense that Anna and Aleks have become characters in the very song they stole. This isn’t “ghost in the attic” horror; it’s “language is a weapon and you pointed it at yourself” horror.
If you’ve ever listened to a traditional ballad and thought, “Okay but if this were literally true, it would be the most metal thing on earth,” this movie agrees.
Olwen Fouéré: Patron Saint of “You Done Messed Up”
Olwen Fouéré as Rita is worth the price of admission alone. She doesn’t play Rita like a sweet old lady guarding a secret—she plays her like the human manifestation of a warning sign. You get the distinct sense that she doesn’t just know the song; the song knows her.
Her performance is wonderfully controlled. She never goes for cheap theatrics. Instead, she radiates the quiet menace of someone who has lived with a cursed inheritance her whole life and is bone-tired of seeing idiots come sniffing around it like it’s a rare vinyl.
When she finally sings, it’s not just a plot point. It’s an event. Between Fouéré’s presence and Ian Lynch’s score, you genuinely believe this thing could rearrange your insides if you heard it live. Which, in horror terms, is exactly what you want.
Soundtrack: The Real Ancient Evil (In a Good Way)
Speaking of Ian Lynch: the soundtrack absolutely slaps in that slow, ominous, doom-folk way. As a member of Lankum, he already specializes in “what if traditional music, but it feels like a funeral for the sun,” and that sensibility is all over the film.
The soundtrack doesn’t just underscore scenes; it feels like another character. You could watch this on mute and still get the plot, but you’d miss the soul of it. The music is the connective tissue between ancient curse and modern greed, between the past’s brutality and the present’s desperation.
Also, this is one of those rare horror movies where you could reasonably add the soundtrack to a playlist and not feel like a complete psycho. Well, mostly.
Unknown Faces, Unnerving Energy
For the most part, the cast is made up of relatively unknown actors, which works beautifully. Because you don’t have any big-star baggage, everyone feels more vulnerable, more real. You’re not waiting for a “name” character to live or die; you’re watching ordinary people realize they’re in a universe that doesn’t care about their narrative expectations.
Simone Collins’ Anna is brittle, searching, and increasingly unmoored—a woman whose failed career and desperation make her the perfect mark for something dark and hungry. Charlie Maher’s Aleks starts as scheming partner and slowly turns into something much stranger as the curse wraps around them both (his later… transformations… are delightfully unsettling).
Gary Whelan, as the Old King, feels like the myth bleeding into the modern world—half memory, half hallucination, all bad news.
Yes, It Gets Weird. That’s the Point.
Critics have fairly pointed out that the film becomes less “coherent” as it goes along. And it does. The first half is tightly plotted: road trip, research, Rita, recording, oh-no-we-messed-up. The second half slides into something more dreamlike, fractured, and symbolic.
But honestly? That’s kind of the charm. This is a story about a song so old and powerful it overwrites reality. If everything stayed neat and logical, it would feel fake. Instead, Duane leans into disorientation. Scenes bleed into each other. Time folds. Identities blur. You’re not always sure if you’re in the “real” world, in the song, or in the king’s curse itself.
Is it confusing? Occasionally. Is it also exactly the kind of narrative meltdown you’d expect from a film about language-induced metaphysical corruption? Absolutely.
This is folklore as cosmic horror: you tug on the thread of an old story and discover it’s wrapped around your throat.
Shoestring Budget, Big Curse Energy
Knowing this was made on a shoestring budget Duane initially funded himself makes it even more impressive. There’s no reliance on big CGI set pieces or elaborate effects. The film uses:
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Sound and silence
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Faces and performances
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Dark rooms, empty spaces, ominous countryside
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And one very cursed song
to do the heavy lifting. It feels intimate and handmade in the best way—like an indie zine of a horror film, but actually polished.
Instead of trying to fake a blockbuster, All You Need Is Death stays small and specific—and ends up feeling much bigger inside your head than plenty of more expensive genre movies.
Final Verdict: Hit Play If You Dare
All You Need Is Death isn’t for everyone. If you need your horror neatly explained, with lore bullet points and a clear final boss fight, this will probably frustrate you. But if you like your horror:
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Folk-rooted and myth-soaked
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Heavy on atmosphere and sound
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Willing to get weirder instead of safer
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And uninterested in holding your hand
…this is a slow, haunting, beautifully made little curse of a movie.
Just maybe don’t go around recording old songs from elderly women in rural pubs afterward. Or if you do, at least don’t say, “We can probably sell this.” That’s how you end up on the wrong side of a thousand-year-old breakup ballad, and frankly, Spotify does not need that kind of energy.
