Without Name review: hell-bound for naked forest nuttiness

Lorcan Finnegan is the talented director behind such short-form discombobulating delights as Curiosity (2006), Changes (2007) and Foxes (2012). We have no doubt that he will one day make a terrific feature film. Unhappily, Without Name is not that film.

Adding a post-colonial footnote to a well-worn folk horror formula, English land surveyor Eric (Alan McKenna) is dispatched into Irish woodland at the behest of an ill-defined corporation. He is soon joined by Olivia (Niamh Algar), his younger assistant and lover, but not before he sees and hears something in the forest, and happens upon a handwritten manuscript entitled “Knowledge of Trees”.

Is Eric’s dysfunctional family life taking a toll? Or is there a more supernatural explanation?

So far, so spooky. But Garret Shanley’s ambitiously ambiguous script quickly gets mired between ley-line horror, eco-fable and psychological badlands. The onscreen pacing, too, fails to coalesce into involving atmospherics.

Add local nutter Gus (James Browne) to the mix, with his tinfoil-hat chit-chat about auras, and an unhealthy dose of magic mushrooms, and this already muddled psyche-out descends into a flurry of jagged edits and bad-trip cliches. At best, the silly final act looks like a remake of Roman Polanski's Repulsion by the Scary Movie team. At worst, it's a cut-price Shrooms clone.

When genre fans say “beware the 15A horror film”, they’re not talking about the scare quotient, but they could be talking about this film.

Against all this, a hardworking cast stay straight-faced, adding nuance and realism to a project that is hell-bound for naked forest nuttiness. Tech specs also impress: Piers McGrail’s creepy chiaroscuro cinematography and Gavin O’Brien and Neil O’Connor’s unsettling score never falter, even when the movie literally and figuratively loses the plot.  Disappointing.