Wake Wood – 2011 | 90 mins | Horror | Colour

Plot Synopsis

The third release from the revived Hammer Films is David Keating’s rural horror involving a young couple struggling to come to terms with the loss of their daughter. Brendan McCarthy’s script taps into the theme of rural pagan horror, a genre successfully explored in the early Seventies in Blood on Satan’s Claw and The Wicker Man, and borrows from WW Jacobs’s macabre tale ‘The Monkey’s Paw’. Keating’s disturbingly bleak picture conjures up a believable modern pagan community who revert to the dark ages and a distraught couple that soon realise ‘not everything that comes back is the same’.

Veterinary surgeon Patrick Daly (Aidan Gillen) and his pharmacist wife, Louise (Eva Birthistle), move from the city to the small Irish border town of Wakewood when their nine-year-old daughter, Alice (Ella Connolly), is brutally killed in a frenzied dog attack. Sensing their loss, avuncular country squire Arthur (Timothy Spall) introduces the couple to a secret, pagan resurrection ritual that will allow them three more days with Alice before she is returned to the ground forever. However, having been reunited with their daughter, the Daly’s are reluctant to let their daughter go despite the superstitious villagers forewarning.