‘Unwelcome’ Review: Jon Wright’s fun and frivolous folkloric horror
Whilst the Martin McDonagh ‘Best Picture’ nominee The Banshees of Ishernin speaks to the beauty and tumultuous past of Ireland’s past, Jon Wright’s latest horror flick Unwelcome toys with the mythology of the historic country, frolicking in the rich folklore.
Framed as a glimmering Irish fairytale gone wrong, Wright’s independent genre film follows in the footsteps of his lighthearted 2012 alien comedy Grabbers, again displaying the filmmaker’s evident love for DIY special effects. Set, at first, in central London, Unwelcome follows a young married couple, Maya (Hannah John-Kamen) and Jamie (Douglas Booth), whose news of an expected child is abruptly halted by a violent assault at the hands of a group of thugs.
Understandably shaken up by their testing encounter, which ended with Maya holding a blade to the throat of the assailant, the couple decides to pack their bags and head out from the smog of London and into the rolling viridescent hills of Ireland. Wildly different from their cramped city apartment, the remarkable new countryside cottage was left to them by Jamie’s Auntie, who mysteriously died in the back garden.
Welcomed into the community by a pub full of friendly locals, their situation appears to be all smiles and rainbows until a family friend, Maeve (Niamh Cusack), asks them to continue a peculiar tradition and leave a plate of ‘flesh’ (any supermarket meat) at the bottom of the garden for the ‘Redcaps’.
A malevolent, murderous type of goblin, the Redcap is a real figure of Border folklore, adding to their creepy mysticism in Wright’s film, with the director using their appearance about as rarely as Steven Spielberg uses his foreboding shark in Jaws. The concept of the small bloodthirsty little forest folk is introduced early in the film, and their names are uttered frequently throughout, yet oddly enough, they awkwardly wait in the wings until the final 30 minutes.
Instead, potentially due to budgetary constraints, the film largely follows the threat that Maya and Jama face from their peculiarly rude handymen and women, who have come to fix the hole in the roof. Played by the likes of Layer Cake’s Colm Meaney, Jamie-Lee O’Donnell of Derry Girls fame and Kristian Nairn, who is better known for playing Hodor in Game of Thrones, the supporting cast is stuffed with talent, yet screenwriters Mark Stay, and Jon Wright make little effort to make them anything more than one-note cartoon characters.
Whether intentional or not, the script feels more like the words of a children’s storybook than a modern screenplay, with characters being mere clichés and stereotypes, whilst all the effort and passion was filtered into the villainous Redcaps at the heart of the story. Fantastically realised with largely practical effects, the villains of the tale carry much of its warmth and pleasure, mirroring the mischievousness of Joe Dante’s Gremlins and the devilish malevolence of the titular antagonists of the beloved Puppet Master horror series.
Still, as an Irish fable that joys in creatively pushing the boundaries, Unwelcome is a surprising treat. With a little more publicity, the naughty little Redcaps at the heart of this horror showcase could become absurd horror icons.
