October is almost here, which means miniature candy bars, pumpkin spice on damn near everything, and—if you’re like me—a month-long horror movie marathon. If you’re also like me, you prefer your horror films atmospheric instead of gorey, uncanny instead of gross-out. More The Shining than Saw. If so, then you should grab a bowl of pumpkin spice popcorn, turn off the lights, and queue up A Dark Song, a gorgeous and disturbing 2016 Irish horror film that’s streaming on Netflix.

A Dark Song is the directorial debut of Irish/Welsh director Liam Gavin, and takes place almost entirely inside one creepy Welsh house. It isn’t your typical haunted house flick though. A grieving woman, Sophia (Catherine Walker), recruits an abrasive occultist, Joseph Solomon (Steve Oram), to conduct a grueling ritual that will allegedly let her contact her guardian angel. At first, Sophia says she wants the angel to grant her a love spell, and Solomon tells her to fuck off: “Just go on a fucking dating website or something.” The ritual they are going to perform is a months-long, psychologically-grueling plunge into dark magic. This isn’t a spell you read off of a piece of paper. It’s brutal ordeal. Sophia convinces him that what she really wants is to contact her dead child, a boy who was murdered by teeangers in another cult ritual. That’s more worthy of the mystic forces, and so they seal themselves off in the house and begin the Abramelin ritual.

For the first half of the film, it’s hard to know if Solomon is the real deal or just an abusive scam artist. He declares Sophia has to do all the cooking and cleaning, has to do everything he says, including ritual sex (“You, uh, ready for all that darlin’?”) as he hurls insults at her constantly like an occult drill sergeant. “Is it going to be horrible?” Sophia asks at the start, when he makes her eat a toadstool. “Yep.” What follows is a claustrophobic and unsettling series of rituals and magical symbols. Almost every mystic element is thrown in: carved circles, chalk triangles, glasses of blood, a black bird, water, stones, candles. At the same time, the film itself avoids many horror movie cliches. The ritual sex ends up a brief, sad moment. There is remarkably little blood. Jump scares are scarce. Instead, A Dark Song disorients and disturbs the viewer, mirroring Sophia’s journey, as it builds to it’s psychedelic and phantasmagoric finale.

After an unknown number of weeks and countless indignities, nothing provably supernatural has happened. Sophia attacks Solomon, accidentally impaling him with a large knife. This blood seems to get the magic working though, even as Solomon slowly grows ill and finally dies. Sophia flees, only to find she’s unable to, being brought back filled with new creatures. It’s a pulse-pounding yet beautiful final twenty minutes. I won’t spoil the ending, but only say that it ends in a the most un-horror of ways: a moment of grace.

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