2016 • Ireland
A locked house, a line of salt and eight months’ worth of meat. A Dark Song (2016) is not the sort of occult film that waves a wand and hopes you will be impressed. It shuts Sophia and Solomon indoors, takes the ritual seriously and asks what happens when grief, revenge and a very specific magical instruction manual are left to ferment together.
In this Folk ’n’ Hell episode, Andy Davidson, Dave Houghton and David Hall gather around Liam Gavin’s two-hander with rare enthusiasm and only a modest amount of nervous laughter. The setup is stark: Sophia, devastated by the death of her child, hires Henry Solomon, a belligerent occultist played by Steve Oram, to guide her through a gruelling Abramelin ritual. What she says she wants and what she actually wants are not quite the same thing, which is awkward when the ritual demands purity, honesty and obedience. It is less a red flag than an entire circle of salt.
The hosts are especially taken with how seriously the film treats magic. Nobody is firing CGI sparks from their fingers. Instead, there are whispers, knocks, stray flowers, gold leaf, locked doors and the awful possibility that Solomon is exactly what he claims to be. Andy argues that the film makes its supernatural elements feel “genuinely magical”, while Dave brings in the occult background, from The Book of the Sacred Magic of Abramelin the Mage to the Golden Dawn and the sort of people who should probably not be left alone with candles.
There are reservations. David wishes the film gave a stronger sense of time passing during the ritual, and there is some forensic concern about the practical realities of being drowned in a bath without damaging your feet on the taps. But these are small complaints in a discussion that keeps circling back to the film’s force, craft and strange emotional payoff.
Is it folk horror? The answer wobbles, then lands. It may not fit the hosts’ usual criteria neatly, but with its isolation, ancient ritual, occult belief and a house unshackled from reality, A Dark Song earns its place in the field. Or possibly the sealed Welsh house at the edge of the field.
“It’s really hard to make a film about magic without the magic appearing to be cheesy.” FolknHell host, Andy Davidson
Sophia rents a remote house in Wales and hires Henry Solomon, a blunt, grubby and alarmingly knowledgeable occultist, to perform a long and dangerous ritual. She claims she wants to speak to her dead son, but Solomon gradually realises her true aim is revenge against the people responsible for his death.
The ritual demands isolation, discipline and total honesty. The pair seal themselves inside the house with salt and begin a gruelling process of fasting, cleansing, prayer, invocation and endurance. As months seem to pass, strange signs appear: voices, flowers, knocks, gold leaf and presences that may not be what they pretend to be. The deeper Sophia goes, the more the house becomes a closed universe with its own rules, and no polite way back to normality.
The hosts begin by admitting the problem: A Dark Song appears on plenty of folk horror lists, but it does not stroll neatly through the usual Folk ’n’ Hell gate. The threat is not obviously “of the land” in the rural pagan sense, and there is no sinister village community offering you cider and doom. There are just two people, a house, a ritual and a lot of salt.
Still, the old forces are very much present. Dave points to the film’s grounding in occult tradition and ancient magical practice, while Andy argues that its world is built from the same stuff that makes folk horror powerful: old belief systems, forbidden processes, isolation and a growing awareness that the characters have entered a situation whose rules they do not understand until it is too late.
David helps bend the “isolated community” criterion into something stranger. Sophia and Solomon isolate themselves so completely that, when Sophia tries to leave, the world loops her back to the house. They have made their own terrible little community, population two, plus whatever is behind the door. “I want to say it’s folk horror adjacent.” FolknHell host, Andy Davidson
By the end, Andy rules it in. Not textbook folk horror, perhaps, but folk horror by flavour, ritual and dread.
- Ritual as imprisonment The house is not just a location, it becomes a sealed ritual machine. Once Sophia and Solomon cross the salt line, ordinary time, space and common sense start to lose their rights.
- Grief curdled into revenge Sophia’s pain is real, but so is her deception. The film keeps asking whether grief can justify what she is trying to do, and whether forgiveness is a gift, a punishment or the only exit left.
- Magic without glitter The hosts admire how practical and grounded the occult material feels. The supernatural creeps in through small details before the film finally allows itself one enormous, luminous revelation.
- Truth as a dangerous ingredient Solomon keeps insisting that honesty matters, and the film proves him right in the least comforting way possible. A lie inside a ritual is not a private failing, it is a structural hazard.
- The house outside reality The film’s folk horror credentials strengthen when the house becomes more than a building. It is cut loose from the world, a place where the road leads back to itself and the old rules have teeth.
- Redemption with bruises The ending impressed the hosts because it does not simply punish Sophia. It drags her through terror, guilt and hellish imagery before arriving at something unexpectedly moving.
A Dark Song receives one of the stronger Folk ’n’ Hell responses so far: Dave gives it an 8, David gives it a 7, and Andy talks himself up from a 7 to an 8 because he cannot fight his own instincts. That makes 23 out of 30, which feels about right for a film the hosts find frightening, tightly made and emotionally potent.
They praise the performances, the restraint, the occult texture and especially the final appearance of the guardian angel, which Andy describes as awe-inspiring in the literal sense. David’s favourite moment is quieter and nastier: Death sitting in a chair, smoking in the dark while Solomon dies nearby. Very Folk ’n’ Hell, really.
The verdict is clear: even if its folk horror status needs a little salt-circle negotiation, A Dark Song is absolutely recommended. Perhaps not alone, and preferably not in a house with too much freezer meat.
How each host rated this film