The 2016 film Without Name, directed by Lorcan Finnegan and written by Garret Shanley, centres around a middle-aged freelance land surveyor called Eric, who sets out on an assignment to survey an ancient isolated Irish forest for a developer that wants to level the area and build on it. The forest is said to have never been recorded on maps and only has a folkloric name, which means “without name” and appears to have some form of possibly paranormal or preternatural powers that it uses to defend itself and subsume the surveyor.
In some ways, the film utilises and follows some of the classic tropes of folk horror, in particular, those relating to an outsider being led a merry dance and to his (sort of) doom by and via a rural community, but in this case, the rural community is the land and nature itself.
While working on his survey, Eric stays at a cottage in the forest and discovers that the previous inhabitant, William Devoy, carried out extensive, apparently autodidactic, self-led esoteric research into the possibility that trees communicate with one another, the results of which he recorded in a notebook he labelled Knowledge of Trees which Eric finds in the cottage. This research included taking Kirlian photographs, some of which are still in the cottage, that he used to create otherworldly and uncanny images of plants’ auras, which in the film are said to change and indicate distress when they are damaged, and the use of natural psychoactive mushrooms etc which grow in the forest to connect with and understand what he thought of as the forest’s hidden language. The locals tell Eric that something about living in the forest eventually caused Devoy’s sanity to fracture, and after he was found catatonic and suffering from hypothermia in it, he was confined to a care home where he is shown to still be, now aged and still unresponsive.
Devoy’s research seems to suggest that the forest’s paranormal or preternatural powers may actually be the actions of a sentient forest and tree civilisation or consciousness of some form that exists beyond the understanding of conventional science. However, this is not straightforwardly nor directly explained and the film as a whole, without being overly wilfully abstruse, does not attempt to provide neatly resolved answers and explanations about all that takes place but rather to a degree remains intriguingly cryptic. Accompanying which rather than utilising graphic gore, extensive CGI, etc the film instead uses sound design, changes in lighting and subtly distorting visuals within the forest etc to create an unsettling atmosphere.
Alongside this, it lends itself to repeated viewings as it includes sometimes only briefly seen or heard “clues” which, on first viewing, may not be noticed or their possible meaning ascribed. These include Devoy having left a book in the cottage called Occult Defence, which suggests that he may have been attempting to protect himself against the powers of the forest and also when Eric drives through his city home on his way to the forest, there is a brief snatch of discussion on his car radio about liminal, i.e., threshold, places, which the forest is eventually shown to be and that in turn his position in it becomes.
Its story shares some similarities with M. Night Shyamalan’s 2018 film The Happening, in which the Earth and nature appear to be defending themselves and rejecting humankind by releasing an airborne toxin which causes humans to commit suicide. As with that film in Without Name, it is not so much humans per se that nature is rising up against but rather human civilisation and its destruction of nature alongside our widespread detachment from and disregard for the natural world. In Without Name, this detachment, disregard and destruction are given striking expression in a stark opening scene, which shows Eric surveying a quarry that, as the camera pulls away, is revealed as having been reduced to a moonscape-like industrial site which is denuded of nature. He is shown to be a tiny isolated figure who is dwarfed by the landscape, and this seems to suggest our potential insignificance or lack of power next to the scale and might of nature, the planet and existence as a whole, themes which the film goes on to explore, reflect on and develop.
This scene is followed by Eric then being shown living with his wife and son in a modern, notably starkly Brutalist architecture like block of urban flats where they seem to live an at least comfortably affluent life. Equally, there is evidence of considerable dysfunction and non-communication between them, which is given extra weight when it is later revealed that Eric is having an extramarital affair with the student who helps him to survey the forest, all of which in an oblique way seems to heighten a sense of Eric’s dysfunction and detachment from nature and how his actions may adversely affect it.
Throughout the film, the developer’s representative, who is only seen via video chats with Eric and therefore both him and his company keep themselves at a safe remove from any problematic local community responses etc, which may result from their actions, is shown as being dispassionately amorally unconcerned about the negative environmental affects that the development will cause. In turn, Eric repeatedly sidesteps his part in facilitating these by saying that he is just recording data and that neither he nor his student helper are responsible for what others do with it. The developer’s representative tells Eric that he chose him for the job as he is known for being discreet, and Eric, despite voicing some reservations, at his employer’s request, attempts to carry out the survey of the forest in a low-key under the radar manner in order to prevent any potential problems with regards to protests etc about the forest’s development’s environmental impact and he is deliberately vague or gives a cover story that he is working on an academic study of the forest to locals. All of this suggests that it is not the first time he has worked on contentious surveys and that he is not overly averse to using subterfuge in order to do so nor all that resistant to overcoming any qualms he may have about his work.
In an early scene, there is an indication that nature is not a meek agent that will continue to lie down and allow its destruction when, before setting off to the forest, Eric is stopped in his tracks by the sight of a single small plant which is determinedly and defiantly growing from a crack in the concrete floor of his block of flat’s indoor car park. This intimation of nature’s resistance continues, albeit in an unsettling paranormal or preternatural manner, when as soon as Eric begins his surveying of the forest, the lighting in it seems to ominously respond and change whenever he “invades” it by pushing the poles of his surveying equipment into the earth.
He also repeatedly glimpses a dark, featureless silhouetted figure in the forest, which remains constantly just out of reach. This figure may in fact be some form of paranormal guardian or assistant of the forest who helps it protect itself and warn off those that threaten it, although when there is an unexplained scattering and overturning of Eric’s equipment, he initially thinks that this and the shadowy figure may just be one of the locals “mucking about” or perhaps are the actions of somebody who does not want the land developed.
As the days pass, Eric begins to lose his grip on reality, which may in part be due to his use of natural psychedelics, which he and his helper are first introduced to by a free-spirited traveller that they meet who lives alone in a caravan in the forest, and that later Eric picks from the forest and prepares according to instructions in Devoy’s notebook. Eventually, it seems that, without being directly explained, rather than losing his sanity, this taking of psychedelics, and indeed that they grow in the forest, is part of a process which is part of a defence mechanism used by the forest through which Eric’s consciousness and place in reality and existence are accessed and altered. It becomes apparent that, in some way, he is being prepared or directed by the forest or some other related paranormal or preternatural power to become a replacement for its current guardian, the featureless figure which he has seen in the forest, who seems to be a preternatural bilocational parallel plane of existence projection or “otherly” body of Devoy who is shown as being still catatonic in a care home.
Eric’s existence also seems to be becoming bilocational when he is shown in the cottage watching himself in the forest. When his “otherly” body meets the shadowy guardian figure amongst the trees, the latter of these transforms into Devoy, who attacks Eric and defeats this version of his body, which appears to precipitate and enable Eric becoming a new replacement guardian and which, in turn seems to awaken Devoy’s “real world” body from its unresponsive state.
The final scene shows Eric alone in the forest, looking scared, confused and bewildered. As his transformation into the forest’s new guardian becomes complete, the final image is of him taking the same form that Devoy’s “otherly” body had before him as he becomes a featureless silhouetted creature amongst the trees of the forest. Has this happened or been instigated due to the forest having a form of sentience, and this is its punishment and warning to all who threaten it, or does it understand that Devoy’s real-world body is becoming old and will, therefore, eventually no longer be able to sustain and guide his “otherly” body in its role in the forest? Or is it due to Devoy himself wishing to escape from a role which his research led him to but in which he has found himself a trapped and unwilling conscriptee? This is left unexplained, as is whether the developer’s plans have been stopped in some way by what has happened to its contracted surveyor but there is a sense that the forest is an implacable, resolute and unending foe which now has, if not a willing accomplice, then at least a powerfully reinvigorated weapon in its armament.
