CFF 2024: A Guide to Becoming an Elm Tree

Folk horror at its most haunting, “A Guide to Becoming an Elm Tree” is a beautiful and melancholic look at grief and selfish desire.

For your putrid, doom-laden souls, Adam and Skye Mann offer you their newest film, A Guide to Becoming an Elm Tree. The absurdity of the title is not lost, although that title is the best way to describe the main storyline.

Fortunately, many roots grow from that majestic story.

Even though most of it occurs outside, this is a textbook example of a chamber piece. There are one or two incidental characters; however, the two main characters (essentially, the only two characters, period) are Padraig (James Healy-Meaney) and John (Gerry Wade).

Padraig exists in a swarm of sadness and blends perfectly with the elegantly grim photography.

One day, he visits a legendary village woodworker named John. Padraig asks John to build him a coffin out of elm, and that’s the scenario for most of the movie.

John teaches Padraig the painstaking art of woodwork while telling him ancient Celtic folk tales about the magic of the trees. He gives Padraig an old, dry-rotted (beautiful!) book so he can spiritually appreciate woodworking.

John tells long-bygone legends that are too dark, even for the darkest fairytales. 

For unknown reasons, Padraig wants to unearth his recently deceased wife and put her in the elm coffin.

We get short blinks of a flashback of Padraig looking very angry and sweaty, glaring with rage at something on the floor. The scene explains nothing, but we can figure it out because we know the language of movies.

Padraig is in shock and almost completely silent due to the intensity of his mourning. In John’s workshed, he finds all the books from which John has been mining his stories. His grim heart is mistakenly given a jolt of the narcotic called hope, and he attempts to use a spell to bring back his wife.

However, he specifically requested to be “reunited” with her, which is a very important detail.

John is blind to these events, which feels like a plot hole. He understands what Padraig is dealing with—his grief and desperation. Being such a wise old Irish wood Yoda, he should have hidden the “don’t read” books better. But that isn’t the way stories are told. Logic doesn’t nourish good stories.

On one particularly sullen afternoon, John insists they go for a pint. At the village tavern, John explains to the bartender that Padrig is having a rough one, so the bartender offers a story.  It leaves Padrig in a panic, and he runs out of the tavern. The bartender tells John that people talk in the village, and everybody knows about Padrig.

Padrig begins to choke on leaves and spit them out as if they were coming from inside him. At first, there was one, then a few, and then many. Voices begin to whisper in his mind. He spends more time under the elm tree during the day as if waiting for his wife to return.

And one day, she does. But he should have been careful how he worded his wish.

There is so much more to this delicate and delicious dark fantasy than what is mentioned in this review. 

Enjoy the third act on your own. It devastates to the point where you won’t want to hear or see it anymore.

There is something about how forests look in black and white, like they’ve been haunted for centuries. Filmmakers Adam and Skye Mann adore their countryside and film it with love. There are some long takes here, but the movie requires those lengths to convey the big emotions.

While taking nothing away from the movie, it would be a trip to see versions of this by David Cronenberg, Brian Yuzna, and Frank Hennenlotter.

Wade is fantastic as the welcoming, grandfatherly, yet stern John. He is sharp with sarcasm but just enough well-meaning soul to forgive him. It breaks his heart to see Padrig travel down the path he takes.

This would be a great winter movie. There is no snow or references to coldness, but everything is black and white and so damp that you’ll check your shoes several times for mud.