Entwined – review

Director: Minos Nikolakakis

Release date: 2019

Contains spoilers

I watched Entwined on the basis that I would (hopefully) be getting a decent dose of folk horror (which it is, with an aura of the fairy-tale) but also discovered something that has a vampiric aspect. Whatever our lead character is (and I suspect she is based on a dryad, but there are is an element of siren also), she is most definitely an energy vampire also.

This leaves us with an impressive, lyrical, directorial feature debut for Minos Nikolakakis that also has some deliberate nods towards Dracula.

nearly a collision

Panos (Prometheus Aleifer), a doctor, decides to leave his city life behind after his father dies of cancer and, despite protestations from his half-brother George (John De Holland), moves to the countryside and specifically the village of Alyti. On the drive there, distracted by his mobile, he barely misses running over a young woman (Anastasia Rafaella Konidi), who runs into the forest. He is the first doctor the village has had and they seem unresponsive to him. At night he hears music playing.

Panos bored

One night he follows it, driving out of the village and finding a small house in the forest (the music coming from a phonograph). Inside is Danae, the woman he almost ran over. As he speaks to her he notices a patch on her arm, where the skin is scaling, and almost liked cracked bark. There is movement from another room, her father (Kostas Laskos) she says and tells him to leave but the old man, outside, nearly hits him with a bottle. In the village he has one patient, a woman with a gouged face who mentions the forest and who pines for her missing son.

the old man attacks

He returns to Danae during the day and enters the house but sees, through boards into another room, her having sex with the old man. The old man comes out and attacks him and Panos instinctively pushes him, cracking the elder's head open, and so rushes him to the village before heading back to Danae – though the village cop has mentioned to him the evil ones being marked so you can recognise them. He puts cream on Danae’s arm (later he discovers patches of the bark-like scaling on her back) and she gives him food and drink. Suddenly fatigued, she tells him to lie down, but when he awakens she says three days have passed.

Anastasia Rafaella Konidi as Danae

Panos tries several times to leave but the forest will not let him. It seems to grow thicker and the way to the road is lost to him, always returning to the house. Danae, for herself, suggests that she need to keep the house fire always burning as “It’s the life-blood that keeps the house alive” this felt a tad Dracula-like tonally, but it is later we get the real Dracula connection, when she says, about a locked cellar area, “I beg you, do not wander in any part of this house. It is ancient and has many memories… some that are best left unremembered. Besides there are bad dreams for those who sleep unwisely.” This, of course, is almost lifted from the novel, indeed, the last sentence being almost verbatim.

finding a mirror

Danae says this when he is looking for a mirror. We have seen subtle aging in Panos but, after consummating their love, we see him age rapidly, and later she marries him in a handfasting. The lack of mirrors (one of which he finds in the cellar when he steals her key) is to hide this from him. She is draining his youth away and we see her, at one point, literally draw the breath from him. That and the fire (burning wood) allow her to remain in human form – “you and only you that prevents me returning to my roots” – with the bark coming through occasionally and the handfasting taking place at the tree she says she originated from. It is for this reason I mentioned thinking her a dryad, though the record she plays almost has a siren quality to it, the music seemingly travelling an impossibly long distance, drawing a lover and holding their attention.

Danae and Panos

I was really taken by this, it does feel like a fairy-tale – the photography lending itself to that aesthetic and the relationship between the two becoming co-dependent and weirdly abusive (beyond the vampirism taking place), with Danae emotionally attached to the man she is quickly killing. Of course, the viewer realises as Panos ages that the old man was the missing son mentioned by the villager, so her previous victim, and we do see him pass due to old age. A slow burn, for sure, but worth 7 out of 10, for me at least.

The imdb page is here.

On Demand @ Amazon US

On Demand @ Shudder via Amazon UK