Banshee (2026)

Banshee arrives from the bogs of Donegal carrying 35mm grain, a mysterious comb, and the weight of a director who has decided that Irish folklore needs a contemporary conscience. Peter Vass, transitioning from comedy to folk horror with apparent sincerity, has crafted a short film set in the 1880s in which the heroine, Róise, is described in press materials as a woman who is "ahead of her time in terms of her way of thinking." This is the foundational move: take a historical setting, populate it with a protagonist whose interiority belongs to a later century, and allow festival programmers to write the rest. The banshee, that ancient harbinger of death from Irish tradition, is thus recruited into a story about female agency. The banshee herself has not been consulted on this arrangement.

To be fair to the film, its progressive sensibilities are worn lightly. There is no speech. No one turns to camera. The horror atmosphere and the 35mm photography have received the bulk of critical attention, which suggests Vass had the discipline to let the craft do most of the talking. The feminist framing is present but not aggressive, more a directorial posture than a structural argument. A woman protagonist in folk horror is not, by itself, a political act, and Banshee seems to understand this at least some of the time.

The result is a film that sits at the very shallow end of the social consciousness spectrum, which, for a short folk horror shot in rural Ireland, is perhaps exactly where it should be. The tradition it is most visibly engaging with is the tradition of the atmospheric Irish short, a form that has never required a manifesto. The comb is mysterious. The banshee wails. The heroine thinks modern thoughts in a nineteenth-century landscape. We have seen this before, and we will see it again, and each time the 35mm grain will make it feel more legitimate than it perhaps is.