Director Lorcan Finnegan and writer Garret Shanley always imbue their mysterious movies with a great deal of sociopolitical commentary and horror. Without Name meditated on the corporate profit of ecological disaster and the consequences of disregarding the environment, while the suburban Vivarium commented on housing development and the lonely meaning of private property. Their new film, Nocebo, continues to integrate political themes into thrillers with roots in Irish folklore.

The film stars Eva Green as the somewhat successful fashion designer Christine and Mark Strong as her husband Felix. Nocebo finds Christine with her mental health in poor shape, eight months after a horrifying hallucination. When a Filipina caregiver is assigned to help her, secrets and supernatural forces bubble up to the tense surface, threatening to pop Christine’s reality. The folk horror film has a lot to say about globalization, economic inequality, and colonialism, and Finnegan elaborated on all of this when he spoke to MovieWeb.
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Lorcan Finnegan on His and Garret Shanley’s Filmmaking Process

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Nocebo is named after the medical term for the inverse of the placebo effect and occurs when people’s negative expectations and thoughts about something manifest as adverse physical side effects. When researching it, Finnegan and Shanley discovered its relationship with shamanism and the power of suggestion.

“Garrett and I met like years and years ago,” said Finnegan, who has known Shanley since before their excellent 2011 short film Foxes. “So we end up talking about a lot of stuff, things we’re interested in. Usually, themes are the way we get into a story, to kind of explore something that feels contemporary, relevant, and relates to our times. That sort of begins the process.”

The director explained their quasi-stream-of-consciousness process to developing Nocebo, which saw them drawing from the colonialist subjugation of Ireland and the Philippines alike. “So we were reading about placebos and nocebos and how they relate to shamanism, basically, and how shamanism in Ireland existed. We were pagan animists before Christianity, and then with the arrival of Christianity, these powerful women who were healers kind of got pushed away, and then colonialism happened, and capitalism, and pharmaceutical industries.”

Nocebo Unites Ireland and the Philippines

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Nocebo does a fascinating, unnerving job at connecting the dots between mental health and the colonialist overthrow of less pharmaceutical cultures. In some ways, late capitalism is a placebo we all take — we’re promised and conditioned to believe that it’s good for our health, despite the suffering and income inequality around us.

“You can’t make any money from placebos, but they do work, which is interesting. So, that was the initial kind of inspiration, and we just started doing a lot of research, which led us to lead us to these parallels between Ireland and the Philippines, and they were colonized by the Spanish. Christianity was introduced, and they had these powerful priestess women, but they were eradicated as well,” continued Finnegan. “The Philippines are big, there are [7,100] islands, so they still have a strong tradition of shamanism in some islands, like Cebu and Siquijor. We started researching, and went there.”

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If Nocebo feels like it has a deeper understanding of pre-Christian, folkloric culture, that’s because Finnegan and Shanley are extremely authentic. “We met with witch doctors and shamans, kulam practitioners who do black magic, tribal chiefs, the Aeta and the Teduray, and went to garment factories. Then we started seeing the story come together, and these connections between paganism, shamanism, the arrival of colonialism, and the rise in consumer culture, and how they kind of clash,” explained Finnegan. “We hooked up with producers from the Philippines, Epic Media, so we did it as like an Irish-Filipino co-production. So, it was a strange journey.”

Nocebo and Other Irish Movies Look Back to Folklore

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Nocebo is not the first Irish film this year to incorporate older folklore into its horror, with Finnegan’s film joining the great thriller Here Before with Andrea Riseborough and Kate Dolan’s You Are Not My Mother in 2022. Ireland, like the Philippines and other states, seem to be looking back to a time before capital, colonialism, and conquering. “I think it’s part of our cultural heritage,” said Finnegan. “We are connecting with our heritage more because there’s a weird thing with countries that have been colonized all the time, that are kind of embarrassed by their previous belief system.”

“In Ireland, people would have been a little bit embarrassed that, like, certain trees would have been protected because they’re fairy trees or something like that because that would seem very [primitive] to the British. And it’s a little bit the same in the Philippines,” said Finnegan. “Some are embarrassed that a lot of people are celebrating the fact that they have this kind of shamanism in their culture. But I think it’s something that should be celebrated. We should be proud of that, that rich history of folklore and tradition, and not let it just disappear […] We make films, and it’s a way of making contemporary folklore.”

Finnegan and Nocebo Show Fashion as a Post-Colonial Nightmare

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Nocebo examines these pre-colonial aspects of cultures but is also prescient about a globalized world in which national identity gets erased altogether, where the countries in power now invisibly colonize through economics. “There’s this neo-colonial thing going on, where countries outsource everything, so they’re still the masters but have all their manufacturing done in countries that are cheaper, and they can bypass safety regulations, and they can exploit people from afar,” said Finnegan, whose film uses a fashion designer’s mental deterioration to comment on all of this.

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“Colonialism eventually turned into this kind of consumer capitalist society,” concluded Finnegan. “Everything has become a bit homogenized. That’s partly why artists are going back a little bit and thinking about where their cultural identity is. Because at the moment, especially with art and fast fashion, every high street looks the same. Same shops, same crap. People are getting paid less and less, but they get to feel like they have wealth by being able to go into a shop and buy a whole load of clothes that are manufactured in Bangladesh or Vietnam. Something that is very cheap, but it gives them a sense that they have money, so it’s kind of a self-perpetuating nightmare.”

That nightmare is brought to life in Nocebo, a very distinct film that has the ability to scare viewers into contemplating crucial political ideas. Produced by XYZ Films, The Film Development Council of the Philippines, Screen Ireland, Epic Media, Wild Swim Films, and Lovely Productions, Nocebo will be released by RLJE Films in theaters on November 4, 2022, and on demand and digital on Nov. 22, 2022.

The film will stream on Shudder at a later date.