As somebody who had not heard any of this before, it became a curious phenomenon to sit and watch a film and slowly have the realities begin to click into place.

This is a coming of age storyline that you've seen in one form or another for decades. It takes a truly unique voice to make yet another one worth watching.

Great movie. Not sure what people expected but I found it highly entertaining.

An old-fashioned movie made with new-fashioned finesse.

An Irishman brings his neurotically pregnant English wife home to the Irish Republic, where the local villagers are just as weird as you'd expect. Following a tragic house fire they adopt a troubled girl named Daisy. The wife is besotted but the husband has suspicions. As tensions between the parents and their adopted daughter become unbearable, a sinister secret emerges. Stars Michael Finn Seamus McDonnell O'Flahahaherty as Matthew McDonagh.I rate The Daisy Chain at 9.99 on the Haglee Scale, which works out as a dismal 3/10 on IMDb.

Horror movies, such as they are, remain a fairly uniformed experience. Despite the buckets of viscus and brains that are unashamedly tossed around the screen they typically conform to certain expectations; 15 jumps minimum, casual brutal violence and characters so wooden they have to chop them to pieces to prove they're homosapiens.Horrors that have stood the test of time, The Fly, The Shining, Don't Look Now, The Exorcist, The Wickerman all have one thing in common; they shied away from quick thrills. Using relatively few easy jumps and the bare minimum of bloodshed, they work on a purer level of dread. Daisy Chain does just this.The first thing that impresses is the direction. Aisling Walsh, best known for 2003's Song for a Raggy Boy, may not be working from a script of her own but the direction is calculated and assured. The imagery retains a painterly quality, the sets are draped in a muddy colour scheme which makes the outside grim and the inside soft and warm. Images such as the removal of the cross from the wall (only to have left an impression on the wall) and the barren wasteland quality to the setting (shot in County Mayo) leave each shot with a resonant bleakness that is nearly as harrowing as the story itself.The acting from the entire cast is solid but the highlight must be newcomer Mhairi Anderson, playing the eponymous Daisy. The child actor shifts between menace, and adorable with impressive subtlety. Between playfully skipping around to suddenly kissing Samantha Morton directly on the lips, the kid manages to scare the bejesus out of you by doing very little.And while people do get killed in this film we usually only see the end of the event rather than the beginning. The characters don't delve into hysterics, nor do they stupidly allow themselves to be a vulnerable for long. Instead life is shown to be normal despite the abnormal circumstances. The mayhem surrounding the main characters is only a by product of the strange intangible fear that exists within the (albeit hazard free) household. Shots are longer and issues are more repressed- living with Daisy proves to be more scary than living without (in the greater sense of the word).Trust independent film making to lean toward the aforementioned classics above (Daisy Chain even features one or two nods to The Wickermna) and having the understanding to know what really affects in horror. Daisy Chain doesn't make you jump out of your seat, it instead creeps under your skin and lasts for days.

What a strange and beautiful film this is. An intelligent horror with the underlying themes of motherhood and loss. A movie that reminds us all of what it is to be an outsider in a tight knit community and what it is to be different. Morton plays outsider and expectant mother Martha who has lost her first baby through cot death. Pregnant at the time of filming this is a brave choice for Morton who looks amazing!!! Steven Mackintosh plays the steady school teacher husband Thomas. A departure for Mackintosh and one that shows just how wide a range he's capable of playing. Into their lives comes a young girl called Daisy. This role is played by Marie Anderson who's first film this is and although mostly silent throughout she is riveting. She sets Morton and Mackintosh against one another as she inhabits their every waking hour and we slowly start to fear for their unborn child. The wildness of the landscape adds an eerie dimension against which the story is played out. Is Daisy the uncared for child that the community have abandoned or is she the fairy changeling that some say she is????

The above Q and A took place after last night's debut screening at the Raindance film festival in London, an abrupt exchange between an audience member and the film's director, Aisling Walsh. And frankly, for me, her disbelief is the problem. For if she doesn't believe, how can she expect us to? (I have not included spoilers for the film's ending; I only tell the basic set up.)The Daisy Chain is set in a remote corner of Ireland, but even here the locals (bar your one token nut who nobody's ever going to listen to) do not believe in fairies anymore. Nonetheless, living amongst them is a 'fairy changeling', an autistic 10-year old Daisy who, with no more reason than that of a petulant child, is using her supernatural powers to kill off anyone who would get in the way of her mission to find someone to play with. Schoolteacher (Stephen MacIntosh) returns to his hometown with his heavily pregnant wife Martha (played by a heavily pregnant Samantha Morton); they are escaping from London, where their first child died aged only 3 weeks. Very soon Daisy's little brother and parents die in mysterious accidents and Martha, against her husband's escalating alarm, is stepping in as foster mum. If you think you know where this is all heading by now, you're probably right. Comparisons with The Omen are inevitable. Apart from the setting and substituting a fairy-changeling for the Devil, this is basically a copy, with pretty much the same clichéd twists and psychological 'thrills'. The difference is in the level of belief. OK, so The Omen was made in the Dark Ages (1976) when many people still at least half-believed in the Devil. Today nobody does. But however silly the story, every highly-researched detail of The Omen carries utter conviction in its pompous, claustrophobic self so that even today, the viewer is still compelled to suspend disbelief and take that ride. The Daisy Chain clearly lacks belief in itself (or much apparent research) as is evident from unnecessarily sloppy plotting, and from supporting characters and subplot strands that insubstantially manifest out of nowhere and go nowhere. Ironically, Ms Walsh (the director) seems to have lost sight of all this as a result of herself being mesmerised by the beguiling face of promising newcomer Mhairi Anderson (who plays Daisy), just as Martha in the film falls helplessly under Daisy's spell. Mhairi's perfectly fairy/urchin-like face and unsettling stare dominates the film but, as effective as she is, this cannot make up for the lack of scripted thrills. I sensed that much of the audience's enthusiasm afterwards was projected toward Mhairi's presence. Certainly, those around me with stretching necks looked eager and relieved to confirm that Mhairi is actually a sweetly charming and not-at-all evil young lady. Phew!The post-viewing Q and A session held one other surprise that possibly explains some of these problems but prompts other questions. Watching the film, it was immediately apparent that Samantha Morton (whose films I usually always love) was heavily pregnant during the making of the film. Was Samantha boldly (and unsuperstitiously) taking method acting a step beyond? No. It turns out that in the original script Martha was NOT pregnant, and that the script was re-written at a very late stage to embrace this casting coup. This revelation left me reeling. For, as the film now stands, Martha's pregnancy is absolutely central and essential to the entire story. In fact, without it, there would be nothing left but Daisy's face.And I still don't get why it's called The Daisy Chain.