UNWELCOME – directed by Jon Wright – (limited spoilers)

An unassumingly complex story containing some things that are never completely explained and other things that are only hinted at, UNWELCOME begins with a series of apparent coincidences: Maya (Hannah John-Kamen) discovers that she is pregnant; her delighted husband Jamie (Douglas Booth) heads to the store across the street from their London condo for some (alcohol-free) champagne and runs into a trio of thugs who follow him home and beat the crap out of both of them; Jamie’s Aunt Maeve (Jean Evans) drops dead in front of her house in rural Ireland; Maya and Jamie take the ferry north to claim their newly inherited property.

They arrive at their new home in a yellow Fiat 500 Colour Therapy (a model almost certainly chosen to help illustrate the story), and are greeted by Niamh (Niamh Cusak) who shows them around the property. The last thing Niamh does is take them to the back of the garden. “Maeve believed in the old ways,” she tells them, pointing to an opening in the fence. “Every evening, before sunset, she’d leave a blood offering here…a little slice of liver or some such for the little people.” Asked which little people, she explains. “Not Leprechauns, exactly. Some call them the Far Darrig or the Redcaps.” Niamh offers to continue making the daily offering on their behalf, but Maya insists on doing it herself. If this is a mistake, it is an eventually fortuitous one.

As the couple gets settled in the house, we hear part of a song by Dot Allison:

“Echoes of the pain
That you have hung upon the staves
Let it flow, let it flow

I hear the wind
Rattling my window pane
Let it blow, let it blow

Parallel lines
Running through time
Parallel lines
They will never entwine
Birds gunshot scatter from your eyes…”

Maya chases a pigeon away from her bedroom’s windowsill, lies on the bed, and notices a gaping hole in the roof above with that pigeon (probaby the same one) sitting on the edge of it. It rains a lot in Ireland, so fixing the roof becomes a priority. Miraculously, the bedroom has no water damage at all, so the roof damage might be a recent phenomenon.

Before dealing with home repairs, they visit Aunt Maeve’s grave in the churchyard which is on the other side of the woods behind their garden. There they meet Father Brendan (Finbar Lynch) a priest with a scary smile who is not pleased to learn that this pregnancy is Maya’s second, and that her first was aborted. The priest tells them that many years ago Maeve had a child who vanished without a trace. (Niamh gives an account of things that conflicts with both the Priest’s story and Maeve’s tombstone.) Later, in a possibly unrelated incident, Rory (Lalor Roddy) walks his dog by the church while singing a version of “The Ancient Irish French Letter“. Then he and his dog Molly both go missing.

Jamie has more trouble coping with that London home invasion than his wife does, and Maya does not entirely understand the changes it has made in him. When she insists on going deeper into the woods to search for Rory’s missing dog, his overprotectiveness finally gets to her.

MAYA: “You shout more, you know, since that night. You shout more, and you’re punching things. That’s not the Jamie I know. I married a nice guy.”
JAMIE: “And look where that got me.
MAYA: “Yeah, I was beaten, too, but you don’t see me…”
JAMIE: “And I had to watch. I had to watch. And they threatened you and my baby and I couldn’t do a thing.”

She is more than a little surprised that her husband would view himself as a frustrated defender of the family. When he says they are going home and he is going to the pub, she does not follow.

The Redcaps, it turns out, are what Jamie aspires to be. Conjured by circumstance and hired to fix the roof, Colm Whelan (Colm Meaney) and his family of tradespeople are a wonderfully and revoltingly strange bunch. When Eion Whelan (Kristian Nairn) attacks Maya, the Far Darrig come to her defense.

Jon Wright, who co-wrote the screenplay with Mark Stay, told Grant Hermanns of Screen Rant that they could have taken the film in other directions. “You could have been kind of drawn into the more goofy, comical elements of the goblins,” he explained. “And there’s things that they could have done that would be tempting that would kind of bump you out of the reality of the film. Equally over here with the thing that happens to Jamie and Maya…there’s a version of that which is quite dark and morbid, and maybe even bleak and a tiny bit depressing, almost like a gritty real version of that story. I didn’t want to go there either.”

UNWELCOME starts off slowly and ends with a bang. With all the things implied but left unsaid, it almost demands a sequel.

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UNWELCOME can be streamed on SHUDDER, and is available on DVD and Blu-ray.