The Outcasts (1982)

The term "beyond the pale" originally refers to the area around Dublin controlled by the English colonists which was the only area of Ireland that they had complete control; the rest of the country, that which was "beyond the pale", was characterized by the colonists as being savage and untamed, untouched by "civilization". The Outcasts, billed at the time as the first primarily Irish funded film in fifty years, takes place "beyond the pale", in a rural village where poverty and superstition still reign supreme. "Mad Maura", the daughter of a local farmer, finds herself constantly tormented by the other villagers for her lack of socially acceptable behavior. On the night of her sister's wedding to a scheming farmer, her "friends" drag her off into the woods where she encounters the magic fiddler, "Scarf Michael", who is feared by all the country folk, and rumored to have come back from the dead. Maura becomes enamored with Michael, and after their encounter, she is branded as a witch by the villagers, whose torments become increasingly sadistic and violent, and blamed for the blight striking their potatoes. The Outcasts is a film of raw and startling beauty, as well as a dreamlike energy and phantasmagorical wonder. Though grounded in a narrative, it takes frequent detours into the abstract and the surreal, and makes frequent use of rudimentary special effects to conjure up a world of magic and mayhem that in all probability never existed. It is by turns shocking and brutal, magical and wondrous, raunchy and humorous, and is a unique work that deserves to be rediscovered.