“The Point is to Know”: A St. Patrick’s Day Tribute to Irish Horror Classic ‘A Dark Song’
“Have you seen anything that scared you?” the grieving mother asks, cigarette in hand.
“It all scares me,” the occultist replies, his own cigarette dwindling. With barely a pause, the grieving mother replies with another question, perhaps the question she’s been wanting to ask all along: “Is that the point?”
The occultist, also without any pause to think his statement over, responds with what remains one of the most fascinating and chilling moments I can remember in a 21st-century horror film.
“No, the point is to know—to fucking know—to see the architecture and the levers to climb the mountain.”
This exchange, a third of the way through Liam Gavin’s haunting A Dark Song, is crucial to understanding how the film works, what its characters want, and what we’re meant to take from its winding, often bleak descent into the darkness of real ritual magic. In a world full of horror films about the pursuit of secret knowledge, the bits of esoteric wisdom and folklore that the rest of humanity simply can’t stomach, it presents a remarkably clear, unforgettable view of what’s lurking at the other end of that pursuit. And it even offers a mission statement: The point is to know.
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It’s March, the time of year when listicles and social posts recommending the best Irish horror movies pop up like clockwork, and I’m not out to tell you to disregard those lists (hell, I’ve written some of them). There are a lot of great bits of Irish horror out there, and you should feel free to indulge in all of it. What I am telling you, though, is if you want the cream of the crop, the pinnacle of horror cinema as told by Irish filmmakers digging deep into intimate, deeply unsettling terror, you’ll want to watch A Dark Song. It’s a modern horror masterwork, steeped in real occult practices, and chilling not just because of its atmosphere and supernatural allure, but because of its often alarming directness.
The grieving mother I’ve described is Sophia (Catherine Walker), a woman who’s lost her child to a terrible accident and is now consumed by a wish to make it right, to find some kind of closure by any means necessary. To achieve this, she turns to researching magic, and eventually drafts the rough-hewn practicing magician Joseph Solomon (Steve Oram) to help her. For a hefty sum of money, Solomon will help Sophia to perform a months-long ritual from The Book of Abramelin (a real book you can read right now) that will, if done correctly, allow her to commune with a guardian Angel, who will then grant her a wish.
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Solomon (whose very name carries with it magical connotations), agrees to the ritual in part because he wants to meet the angel himself, then insists upon Sophia’s absolute obedience. Together, they seal themselves via a salt circle into a country house in Wales, where they begin months of precise magical workings ranging from purification rituals to blood magic. It’s here, after weeks of running through the same rituals, suffering through everything from freezing water to sexual objectification, that Sophia asks the question: What’s the point of all this work? Why would anyone continue to do it outside of her situation, in which she’s trained all of her efforts on one very specific desire?
And Solomon tells her: The point is to know.
Too often in horror, when it comes to occult rituals and beliefs, we are given an outsider’s perspective on what’s actually happening, and what people actually expect from these traditions. In many films, the occult is presented as outright evil, a path to corruption and violence from which our characters must shield themselves. It’s something to vanquish, not something to pursue. We never get to find out why everyone on Summerisle is so completely devoted to The Wicker Man—we just get to see the end result. We don’t get the Blair Witch’s side of the story. Eggers doesn’t let us follow Thomasin on her magical journey in The Witch.
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A Dark Song, to be clear, is not the first or the only film to dig deeper in this regard, but it is striking in the practical, tactile way with which it engages its subject. This is magic done on your hands and knees, chalk on the floor, with real and immediate consequences to your mental and physical health. At one point Sophia is asked to sit on the floor for multiple days, unmoving, and contemplate a stone. At another, she’s told to drink Solomon’s blood, fresh from his arm, regardless of what pestilences might be swirling within. When she complains that nothing’s happening, that there’s no sign of progress, Solomon simply tells her that they have to keep up the ritual, which means repeating many of the same steps over again.
All of this, Solomon explains, is part of the process of unmooring the house from the wider world, and inviting otherworldly presences inside. He points to various “synchronicities” of purpose, often in the form of wounds or strange animal behavior, as evidence that the ritual is working, but Sophia remains unconvinced. Their relationship is often mutually hostile, even abusive, yet codependent. In a moment of vulnerability, Solomon reveals that his wish to the angel is to simply be “invisible” to the world, to escape from the horrors of life that make him an alcoholic whenever he’s not abstaining for ritual purposes. We’re not given many clues to his background or motivations, but we know that he’s suffered, and we know he suffers still. Yet he keeps going, because the point is to know.
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And this is what brings us to the real greatness of A Dark Song, the crux of the film which makes it both hypnotic and relentlessly brutal to the viewer. Just like Solomon and Sophia, Gavin’s camera is moving in terms of ritual, of repetition, of cycles. The film largely unfolds in one location, which means we see the same rooms, the same magic circles on the floor, the same outfits worn by characters over and over again, and we’re asked to take the same leap that these two lost people are taking alone in the house together. In a world full of cruelty and loss and unimaginable psychic pain, we are asked if we dare to go deeper, to see the secret levers of the universe.
Then we’re asked, if we did see those levers, if we’d dare reach out and grasp them, if what’s waiting on the other side of this reality is possibly worth glimpsing, worth understanding. Is madness better than grief? Are they the same? Is enlightenment, is knowing, worth the price we pay in blood and tears?
A Dark Song comes away, to its eternal credit, with an answer to this question, but it’s not an easy one, nor is it one I’m going to spoil here for people who haven’t seen the movie. By the end, though, the picture is complete, the quest for knowledge resolved with surprising clarity and drive. It’s what makes the film one of the most potent and complete pictures of occult horror you’re ever likely to find, a reaction to and comment on every occult horror film that came before it, and a masterclass in sustained dread and atmosphere. Put more succinctly: It’s a movie that, if you let it, is very capable of changing you.
Categorized:Editorials
