Feed – review

Director: Marco van Bell

Release date: 2026

Contains spoilers

This Irish release mixes the world of influencers with the legend of the dearg-due (in variant spelling dearg-dul). Quoting Bane, it “is a type of vampiric REVENANT from Ireland that has been feared since the days before the introduction of Christianity. These ancient creatures are described as looking like a beautiful yet pale woman who can be seen strolling aimlessly through graveyards at night. It uses its beauty to lure men to it and then kisses them on the mouth. When it does so, it drains them of their blood. To stop a dearg-due from continued assaults, its grave must be found and a cairn erected ond top of it, trapping it beneath. Ireland’s most famous dearg-due is said to be buried beneath a strongbow tree. About four times a year it is able to escape from its grave and feed.”

The film changes the mythology but the changes work (mostly). The influencer side did threaten to undermine the film as the film portrayed them as unlikeable – but one particular ex-influencer worked really well, adding depth to what could have been a vapid cast of characters. However the film begins in 1897 – which, of course, was the publication year of Dracula, though there is no connection with Stoker other than that. We hear banging, it is night and two guys wearing blindfolds on carry a woman (Niamh Hogan).

the boy

The man banging a stick against the rock of a dolmen is also blindfolded and says they must close their eyes to her lies. The men manoeuvre her headfirst into a deep narrow hole dug into the earth. In, she begins to scream. The reactions are different, the man who was beating the dolmen with a stick starts to bash his own head against the rock, one runs into the wood and the third frantically claws dirt into the hole, burying her. The camera follows the running man and he suddenly stops, he says it is done but he has been stabbed by a boy holding a sword. The boy runs his finger through the blood on the blade and rubs it over his teeth…

messaging

A vehicle drives through the Irish countryside. We see the text conversation between Nessa (Daisy Jelley) and Sean (Oskar Smith) bitching about *her* being silent – referring to passenger Orla (Grace Collender). Sean is ordered to do something. Nessa is an influencer, Sean her assistant/collaborator. He starts to film the people in the car, the driver is Austin (Rhys Mannion), Nessa’s boyfriend and photographer. Also in the car is the aforementioned Orla and her boyfriend Lorcan (Clinton Liberty) – he gets angry when the camera is turned on them. Later we discovered that Orla was an influencer with a large following but the use of her camera caused an accident, a year before, where her family died and she was pulled back from the brink of death. Whilst the trip is to shoot footage for Nessa it is also an intervention – though the accusation levelled later that it is less for her and more to enhance Nessa’s following is probably accurate.

Orla blurred

Getting to the house – in the middle of nowhere – we see the awful influencer attitude when Nessa berates Austin for not driving in slowly enough for her to get intro footage. The house is locked but soon Nora (Charlotte Bradley) arrives to give them a key. They start setting up but Orla is literally haunted by her PTSD and wanders off into woods, following a voice only she hears, the others following to get footage. In some respects Orla is the true undead of the film; pulled back from the brink of death, she wants to die but is afraid to because she remembers death as nothingness. At one point a photo of her and Nessa has Orla blurred, as though she can hardly be captured and another time her reflection vanishes, though that is a vampire induced illusion. She leads everyone to the dolmen – which has dearg-due carved into it. There is an icon hanging and fashioned from hawthorn, on which Orla pricks her finger – some blood falls to the ground.

the dearg-due

Things escalate quickly with the dearg-due emerging from the earth and going to the house. Before that Sean has looked up the name and found a mythology that suggests it is the first vampire and was a fallen angel that merged, initially, with a Celtic warrior. It preserved the body of its host for an unnatural span by drinking blood and when the body finally rots it moves to a new host – we discover later that it is Orla’s presence and blood that have brought it back as it wants her body. They are trapped by being buried headfirst under hawthorn and stones. What didn’t quite gel for me were those locals living nearby and awaiting the dearg-due's return – we are told they have tried rituals to bring it back, I don’t think anyone asked why they didn’t just dig her up.

the entity emerges

Other lore we get is that she can make people see what she wants (and the blindfolds at the beginning was to try and prevent this) and her blood getting in a person's eyes, which burns, gives her control of that person. We see her start to haemorrhage deliberately and essentially turn into a pool of blood, in which form she escapes from a room through a drain and reconstitutes as a hand emerges from the blood to touch into someone's spilled blood – this struck me as a more visceral form than the standard fog/mist often used. Sunlight burns the host but not the possessing entity.

influencer culture

The acting in this works – Nessa bugged me intensely and she was meant to. The ranges needed generally were limited and the actors flexed comfortably in those ranges but much more was needed for Orla and, whilst she started as a listless revenant of a character, the full film saw her as a nuanced character (and the only one who elicited true audience sympathy) - Grace Collender carried that transformation well. The effects worked well enough for a budget production, and I liked the use of the dearg-due as a vampire type. A message about the darker side of influencer culture was a tad on the nose but I did enjoy this. 7 out of 10.

The imdb page is here.

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