The Morrigan had its world première at Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival 2025
Expanded and considerably altered from his 2015 short film of the same name, writer/director Colum Eastwood’s The Morrigan opens 1500 years ago in Ireland. A group of women cavorting around a bonfire have their throats slit in a surprise attack from some cross-bearing male soldiers, and the women’s leader (Antonia Campbell-Hughes) is forced to wear a spiked mask that pierces both her eyes. This is a violent collision not just between Christian and pagan, but between men and women – and it is hard not to side with the women, who are unarmed, vulnerable and apparently attacked unilaterally and without provocation. Cut to the present day, and those same conflicts continue, in a different form but essentially unabated.
Even as published academic and professor’s assistant Fiona (Saffron Burrows) helps her students get PhDs, she finds her own path to tenure constantly obstructed by her boss Jonathan Horner (Jonathan Forbes), who takes credit for her work and behaves inappropriately – and worse – towards her when drunk. And when Fiona pitches for an expedition to excavate the possible burial place of the Morrigan – a figure who she argues was a historic human queen mythologised as an evil immortal goddess by the Christian patriarchy that moved in and took over – she is ironically herself facing an all-male academic panel (including Jonathan) who patronise and humiliate her. Fiona is furious, but takes whatever she is given (which is less than she is – reasonably – requesting), having long since learnt to internalise the institutional misogyny that keeps putting her in her place. Her rebellious teenaged daughter Lily (Emily Flain), however, is unable to contain her bitter sense of injustice, and has a tendency to lash out against any perceived indignity. Mother and daughter represent two very different responses to male dominance which will play out over a film that pits these two women against each other as much as against the men who exploit, abuse and assault them.
Expelled from her boarding school for misbehaviour, Lily must unhappily tag along with Fiona, Jonathan and intern Conor (Michael Shea) to Annan Island, a remote – and fictitious – place where Fiona believes that Queen Morrigan lies beneath the foundations of castle ruins. Fiona’s hard-researched calculations and intuitions prove uncannily accurate – and a burial casket is unearthed and brought to the hotel/hunting lodge of the island’s widowed owner Malachy Crowley (Toby Stephens) and his teenaged son Sean (Art Parkinson). Lily is drawn to this Pandora’s box and unleashes a spirit that takes possession of her, empowering the angsty adolescent to liberate herself from everybody’s control. With the men behaving badly (some even before Lily’s transformation) and exposing their worst sides, and with the Church again, as embodied by Malachy’s priestly uncle Francis (James Cosmo), trying to suppress this release of feminine energy, an ancient battle is being renewed through Lily, and Fiona must choose on which side she stands.
As an entity is unearthed in an isolated location, bringing lethal chaos to all around it and threatening even worse should it ever break into the larger populace beyond, The Morrigan is horror in the mould of Ridley Scott’s Alien (1979) or John Carpenter’s The Thing (1982). Yet there are differences. Here the danger is not an extra-terrestrial predator, but rather a figure from Irish legend, even as Fiona’s rationalising suggestion (during her pitch to the academic panel) that traditional accounts of the Morrigan are unreliable licenses Eastwood to rewrite the myth any which way. So while this Morrigan is still, in keeping with convention, associated with crows, she has other powers entirely invented for the film, and is as much symbol of feminine fightback as green-eyed, spidery monster.
As a story, The Morrigan is daft, and that daftness is only exaggerated by some over-the-top dialogue (including the bits in subtitled Gaelic), broad characterisation and silly effects – yet where it becomes interesting is as an exploration of an ongoing, possibly eternal battle of the sexes. While all the characters perceive the Morrigan as something terrifying which must be stopped, in fact she is just an exaggerated version of Lily’s recalcitrance and resistance to authority, and it is possible to regard her resurrection less as apocalyptic nightmare, and more as a course-correcting return to matriarchy, nightmarish only to errant men. Fiona may be as opposed as the male characters around her to the Morrigan’s emergence, but that is only because she has always been captive to patriarchy, immured within its closed system.
Only Lily, in spite or indeed because of her waywardness, insubordination and aggression, can find a way out of this trap, engendering a different, possibly better, world for the future – at least until the tide turns once more. As men here are taken out one by one, balancing the slaughter of women in the prologue, many viewers may find that they are in fact very much on #TeamMorrigan, and conclude, “Good for her.”
strap: Colum Eastwood’s island-set horror unearths a mythic pagan Irish goddess to stage an endless battle of the sexes
© Anton Bitel
