FEED Review: Social Media Meets Horror in the Irish Woods

Five young people head for a weekend away in a lovely Irish home. Little do they know that evil lurks in the woods nearby.

Don't they know they're in an Irish horror thriller?

Feed
The film will be available Friday, August 14, on a variety of On Digital and On Demand platforms via Saban Films.

In this disquieting thriller, written and directed by Marco van Belle, the prologue sets the tone, as two blindfolded men in Ireland in 1897 follow another blindfolded man's directions and plant a bound woman's body in an open grave -- upside down and still alive -- in the dead of night. One of the men begins bashing his head into a wall of stone, and more blood and screaming ensue.

Oh, it's a mess: Bizarre, violent, and unexplained. Thus, when the film proper begins in the modern day as a small group of friends travel through lovely landscapes to arrive at a remote, isolated home, surrounded by nothing but woods, there is every reason to anticipate mayhem breaking out at any moment.

Depending upon your feelings towards social media influencers, you may wish for the violence to begin quickly. That's unfair and unkind, of course.

The truth is that the group's primary intention in making the trip is to help one of their number, Orla Ryan (Grace Collender), who suffered a tragedy that caused her to halt her burgeoning social media career. Orla's boyfriend Lorcan (Clinton Liberty), a tall and hulking sort, is kind and protective toward her, using his body as a shield against the joking asides by the others that skirts the boundaries of friendship.

Ostensibly, Nessa (Daisy Jelley) is Orla's best friend, but she is preoccupied with growing her faltering beauty-line following, with the assistance of her boyfriend Austin (Rhy Mannion), whose own following has skyrocketed in recent months. He aims to be supportive of Nessa in whatever way he can, while busy shooting footage for his own ill-defined channel, which appears to be largely devoted to Nessa.

Sean (Flynn Gray) appears to be the lone single person among the friend-group. He is hopelessly devoted to Nessa, like a puppy dog. Haunted by past tragic events, Orla broods silently, staring into the woods, drawn to something out there.

Orla wanders into the woods, followed by the others. She begins hearing voices, approaches a tree, pricks her finger on a thorn, and sees something terrible that may not really be there.

Uh, oh.

Soon, the nature of what will befall the group is introduced. To be clear, the mythology feels somewhat shaky, and doesn't necessarily ring entirely true. It twists a highly familiar 'legend of the night' into a shape that fits its own narrative intentions.

Purists might be dismayed, yet I was captivated by the shadowy nature that the narrative favors. It's never meant, necessarily, to align with past mythologies or to play out consistently and logically, as one might expect from countless forebearers.

Instead, writer/director Marco van Belle puts his emphasis on the dark and eerie atmosphere, and how the characters react to the situations in which they find themselves. They don't always act as we might expect them to do, which is all to the good of the film, as far as I'm concerned.

With a fair amount of practical effects, van Belle makes good use of his limited locations and limited cast of characters to wrench out a bloody good time. Van Belle previously wrote and directed the fantasy flick Arthur & Merlin, and also earned a screening credit for the highly disappointing Mercy (2026), about which our reviewer Olga Artemyeva wrote, in part:

"The scripts for both Searching and Missing were also meticulous and sharp, and while Mercy's writer, Marco van Belle (for whom it is a second feature screenplay effort), is using a similar approach of briefly introducing seemingly insignificant details to later turn them into twists, that just doesn't work as well with this material. Maybe it's that damned ticking clock, which constantly reminds us that there isn't much time for a bigger story, or it's the limited cast that doesn't leave many options for suspects, but you can basically see all the major revelations almost from the get-go."

Obviously, Feed has a far more limited budget than Mercy, which was produced and directed by Timur Bekmambetov, and who knows what might have been changed in Marco van Belle's original script. Again, though, the script is not the hero in Feed: It's the atmosphere and the performances and the blessedly efficient 83-minute running time.

The combination of those elements make Feed a pungent and effective horror thriller.