Dark Song is a first-time Irish independent film with writer and director Liam Gavin speculating on the opposite. The cinematic magic of the film becomes intense, exhausting, brutal and horrifying with the anguish of its protagonist, who performs a ritual in an abandoned estate to conjure up angelic powers.
In the remote hills of cloud-shrouded Ireland, its protagonists move from ritual to ritual with grim determination. Candles are lit, symbols are drawn on the floor, bodies are covered in blood, and the line between normal and paranormal is blurred and broken.
Gavin’s story is set in a remote house in the Welsh countryside, about a griefing mother named Sophia (the wonderful Catherine Walker ). Like a chamber play between two main characters, the film plunges headlong into the black art of methodical restraint and escalating discomfort. The real horror, however, is the protagonist Sophia, played by Catherine Walker.
Grim Sophia (Catherine Walker) signs a lease on a desolate North Wales estate to interview a serious red-bearded hunk named Joseph (Steve Oram) in a barn jacket for a dangerous mission of black magic.
Dark Song is an independent Irish-British horror film written and rated by Liam Gavin in 2016, starring Steve Oram and Catherine Walker. Dark Song, a new supernatural thriller, had its world premiere at Fantastic Fest 2016 (read our review here). Dark Song premiered at Galway Film Fleadh in Ireland on 8 July 2016 and was screened at Fantastic Fest, BFI London Film Festival and Boston Underground Film Festival in 2016.
An angry and griefless Sophia rents an isolated house in rural Wales and convinces a spirited occultist (Joseph Solomon) to guide her through a grueling month-long ritual that is dictated by the Book of Abramelin which calls her guardian angel, whom she asks to speak to her dead seven-year-old son. After forcing Joseph to consider a possible mental block, Sophia confesses the real reason she wants extra blood for the ritual: to exact revenge on an unknown teenage suspect who abducted and murdered her son from a daycare center. After Joseph calms her down, he puts her in the bathtub and performs a purification ritual.
Another ritual leads to Joseph drowning her in the bathtub and reviving her. As they continue the ritual, Joseph dies, and the dark forces marked in his ritual book catch Sophia in the house. At one point she leaves the house to get in her car, but she is dead before her wanderings lead her back to the house where Joseph lives.
The driving character of her is the loss of her son, and he must stare into the abyss and try himself in the darkest magic, detached from the real world, which is guaranteed to work.
Abramelin implies that the world is nothing more than a matter between heaven and earth, like your dream of Horatio. But he is the real thing and he is crazy in his own way and makes you your guardian angel.
Supported by complete isolation, the two begin a gruelling six-month series of dark rituals that will test them both. Joseph warns Sophia that the ritual, if successful, will call in angels and demons. The unholy alliance between the two damaged souls will lead them on a disturbing descent into the depraved realm of black magic.
“I started staring at the rituals that our screenwriter and director Liam Gavin had worked out for us. These are not penitents who implore the saints or implore the gods in Sophia’s name. They are detailed rituals of leverage-pulling selfish opportunists.
The ritual and detailed complexity and absolute thoroughness of everything our writer and director Liam Gavin has put together for us here is so detailed and crazy that I just had to start chatting to him before I did this interview with us about the total madness he threw at us. Gavin took the time to discuss Dark Song writing and direction in an exclusive interview on Skype from his home in Ireland. Among other things, he talked about why he decided to write Dark Song and why he wanted to create a unique genre of history that consists of only one main setting.
Gavin said he decided to cast Oram Walker because he was skilled and talented at expressing his characters with different emotions. This wasn’t the only connection; Gavin also cast Wheatley’s Sightseers star Steve Oram as Joseph Solomon, a magician whose rituals are at the heart of Dark Song. Solomon was hired by Sophia (Catherine Walker) to perform rituals from Abramelin’s Book of Abramelin, a mystical text that allows her to ask her guardian angels for favors.
After Robert Zemeckis had made a strong impression with his short film, came Dark Song, an intense chamber thriller that offers a conceptual view of occultism. The film removes the visual style and amplifies its moody tone when Sophia’s grieving mother (Catherine Walker) visits the anti-social, alcoholic black wizard Joseph Soloman (Steve Oram).
This book builds on earlier books that focused on the romance between the two main characters. I have been reading this book for 21 years and the characters are becoming more and more real. One of the books contains songs and poems, so you know it will be a romantic book.
This book mentions some new elements of life in the Carpathians, and it will be interesting to see how they influence the future action. It’s a joyous thing to see the characters grow in the course of the book, and when I read it, they began to show off with confidence and swagger. I hope we will return to the Carpathians and the mountains of the missing hunters and warriors.