Moloch

Moloch does something slightly cheeky with folk horror. It takes all the familiar materials, the isolated house, the bog, the buried bodies, the inherited curse, then handles them with the impatience of a modern horror film that would quite like to make you jump out of your chair.

That collision is its best idea.

Early on, a picture hanging in an otherwise still house begins to move. It initially feels suspiciously like the film nudging us in the ribs and saying, “spooky, see?” Then Moloch keeps returning to that kind of intrusion. Figures appear where they should not be, sound arrives with considerable force, bodies are treated increasingly badly, and one particularly effective scare occurs not in some misty woodland but in a brutally ordinary hospital lift. The old thing does not remain politely in the old places.

Which makes the bog more interesting than mere folk-horror set dressing. Archaeologists begin excavating remarkably preserved female bodies from the peat around Betriek’s family home, physically dragging history back into daylight. Yet the film has already suggested that whatever is happening was never safely buried in the first place. The voices, the family history and the violence are moving before the archaeologists get their spades out. The land preserves the evidence, but it may not be causing the crime.

There is a lovely nastiness to that idea: modernity has not defeated the old belief system because the old belief system has simply carried on underneath it.

Moloch does occasionally lose confidence in us. The school play recounting the local legend edges perilously close to presenting the mythology with PowerPoint slides, and some of the later explanation removes mystery the film had earned the right to keep. That over-exposition was one of our few substantial reservations.

Fortunately, the ending gives the film its teeth back. What initially looks like a story about uncovering an ancient curse becomes something colder: anot...