Rating: R | Runtime: 104 minutes
Release Date: January 27th, 2023 (UK/Ireland) / March 10th, 2023 (USA)
Studio: Warner Bros. Pictures / Well Go USA Entertainment
Director(s): Jon Wright
Writer(s): Mark Stay & Jon Wright

You’re a quarter Irish? It’s like being in the presence of Michael Collins himself!

A big part of why I decided to watch Jon Wright’s Unwelcome was the poster. It’s got a cool overhead angle that looks through an opening in the roof of a house. Maya (Hannah John-Kamen) and Jamie (Douglas Booth) are seen below with frightened faces, both looking up—not at us, but little goblin-like creatures that call to mind Labyrinth or Cat’s Eye.

How can you not be intrigued by an image like that? Especially when it plays the presence of these monsters with earnest horror? So, when Niamh (Niamh Cusack) tells Maya and Jamie about the far darrig, or Redcaps, who live behind the property his late aunt has left them, I knew they’d eventually find their way on-screen. You don’t put them on the poster if not. The question was whether they’d bring terror or laughter.

That contrast is unfortunately where things get a bit shaky with Mark Stay’s script (from a story by him and Wright). Since two-thirds of the runtime carries a very dark specter of extreme violence wrought by the depravity of mankind, it’s easy to presume the far darrig will only play a small role—as saviors against that true evil, for a price.

You don’t therefore expect from that darkness (the film opens with a brutal home invasion that justifiably haunts Maya and Jamie’s every subsequent move with the looming potential of eventually having to choose between moral pacifism and cutthroat survival) is the Redcaps giggling beneath a muppet/VFX appearance turning things so far in the other direction that you can’t help getting knocked off-balance. The final act is truly bonkers. Like a completely different movie bonkers.

Should Wright and Stay have introduced some humor earlier on as a result? Probably. I don’t think toning down the prologue would inherently water down the impact it has on them moving forward. The filmmakers are so intent on pushing Maya and Jamie’s backs against the wall of sanity and decency that they kind of forget just how silly their climax proves by comparison. Thankfully, that imbalance doesn’t ruin the experience.

Colm Meaney, Kristian Nairn, Chris Walley, and Jamie-Lee O’Donnell are so over-the-top in their rough-knuckle thuggery as Irish contractors hired by the leads’ English transplants that you can always sense a shift from pitch black drama to the absurd is coming. We’re talking about folklore goblins too, after all. I only wonder if the whole would have been more successful as a PG-13 romp or hard-R nightmare rather than an odd “silly billy” amalgam of both.

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Hannah John-Kamen in UNWELCOME; courtesy of Well Go USA.