Binding Eva (FrightFest 2026)

For a small island, there’s a pretty substantial division between the British countryside and its urban neighbours. You can see it reflected in our film genres. Barring one brief flurry of rural realism about ten years ago (The Levelling, God’s Own Country etc.) most kitchen-sink dramas are set in towns and cities. Similarly, even though there are plenty of history – and tradition-rich cities in the UK, a folk horror film will never be set anywhere other than an isolated rural village. It’s a gap that Conscian Morgan’s feature debut Binding Eva, which premiered at Frightfest, attempts to bridge.

If you were feeling mischievous, you could pitch Binding Eva as a film about what happens when a couple of characters from a Shane Meadows drama end up stuck in an Angela Carter short story instead. It begins with a father telling his son to make a wish, framed in a doorway that resembles a portrait-mode-thin aspect ratio. You know from this directorial choice that the film’s scope will soon widen out, but for a while we remain stuck in this tiny sliver of constrained life. The son’s wish is for his father to stay around this time, a wish that his father treats lightly: doesn’t he know the wish won’t come true if you say it out loud? Clearly, this is a painfully ordinary conversation between these two.

The father is a criminal, and we next see him trying to get away from a botched robbery. The nature of the robbery is never specified, because it never needs to be. We know it leaves him with an injury, a rucksack of something valuable, and a need to get away. The latter requirement sees him steal a car, not realising it contains a mother and a daughter. The car crosses the border from England to Wales – not exactly the Korean DMZ, but a strong hint that something liminal and folkloric is about to happen – and crashes in the woods. The adults try and find their way to freedom, while the child listens to a tape recording of her late father for comfort. You don’t have to be too observant to notice the trio complement each other, two broken families forming a three-person unit, and maybe in a more sentimental film (Jason Reitman’s Labor Day, for instance) this would be what the story is about. But this is premiering at Frightfest.

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Actually, one of the striking things about Binding Eva is that it does manage to find a moving, redemptive conclusion in all of this pain and misfortune. I shan’t reveal what it is, but there is plenty of foreshadowing right from the start. It begins with some on-screen text about “an elder woman [who] keeps to the old crafts”, which is worth keeping in mind. The son at the beginning is called Isaac, and if you can see some connection between that name and the title… well, firstly congratulations for paying attention at Sunday school, but secondly you have some inkling of the dilemma this film will pivot on.

Some of the film overshoots foreshadowing and lands in the realm of the predictable. One late twist, for instance, is very clearly patterned on a landmark of independent horror. I’m of the opinion, though, that the originality of a twist isn’t as important as what the film does with it. Morgan and his co-writers Roffem Uzong and Will Clempner have a very good reason for revisiting it, and indeed there’s a lot of things here that are very sure-footed for a low-budget debut. The cast are an extremely cohesive unit, with a great child performance from Darcey Wood. Haridas Stewart’s cinematography is pushed close to monochrome in the night-time scenes, in the manner of Robert Eggers’s Nosferatu, although the daytime scenes are less atmospheric.

But then, even that might be part of the point. These are some very ordinary woods, not too far from civilisation, and yet they seem to be impossible to escape. It reminded me of a fan theory about The Blair Witch Project, that Mike’s map is so useless because the woods themselves are reforming and reshaping themselves around the three film-makers. Binding Eva finds its own, very British, sense of the folkloric reasserting its power over modernity, and it remains an extremely potent theme.

GRAHAM’S ARCHIVE – BINDING EVA