Tag: Irish

Finky

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QUICK SNAP: LIVE FROM THE TALLINN BLACK NIGHTS FILM FESTIVAL

Seated on a cabin, Fincaí an Folaí (Dara Devaney), nicknamed Finky, operates a string puppet show. Speaking the gorgeous Irish that slithers his tongue, he pulls the wooden dolls from their spirited slumber to rallying childlike whoops. In itself, it foreshadows the lethargic tone the film takes through an impasto of impressively bizarre shots.

It’s the beginning of a convoluted tale that this writer can’t entirely make out, though the uncompromisingly cryptic standing does much to recommend the film as a visual experience. Through the cascade of silhouetted, yellow-lit aquatic lights sits one of the battiest comedies in years. Superficially, Finky works as an Irish language Terry Gilliam-like fairy tale. Yet unlike the blithe Brothers Grimm (2005) and The Man Who Killed Don Quixote (2016), this pays obeisance to the ugly side of the fairy tale genre.

Finky, a character whose life is as vacuous as the wood he pulls, ups and leaves to Glasgow after he upsets an angular mob. His sins catch up with him as he wakes up in the film’s most beautifully filmed sequence, a hallucinogenic bromide that circles his enclosed bed with claustrophobic simmer. Paralysed from the waist down, our protagonist spends the rest of the film embedded to his chair, an eye patch blocking his sight, a metal claw in a hand’s place.

Director Dathaí Keane takes due advantage of the ongoing confusion, as Finky speaks in mumbled, parodic patterns, picking his clawed hand in order to insult his oily, priggish lawyer. Through his puppets and metal objects, Finky finds the freedom to express himself from outside the mask he wears, tussling a wine bottle to the head of an unwitting bar attendee when he demands to take down a mob gang.

Whatever the story is, it doesn’t entirely work, but what works exceptionally are the directorial flourishes that accompany it. A despondent Finky sits at his wheelchair, pouring the frustrations over a darkly positioned keyboard. A close cut caption over Buchanan Bus Station captures the silent passages passengers pull with naturalistic elegance. Meanwhile, a 30-second montage capturing the flopped patterns of tomato ketchup on chips works with an endearingly emotive quality, while a tussled bar fight lights with radiant neon lights permeating the ceilings. It’s one of the most beautifully lit Irish films I have ever seen. Plus, it’s in the Irish mother tongue herself!

It all leads to a satisfyingly inventive closer, a cascading helicopter floating piously over the ports of Glasgow. It all wraps up with another impressive choreography of stylistic symmetrical solitude. You don’t need a copy of Tomás Ó Criomhthain’s An tOileanach in order to enjoy the variety of shots on display!

Finky is showing at the 23rd Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival as part of the First Feature Competition.

Monster (Arracht)

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Our story takes place in 1845 on the misty Irish coast. The potato blight is quickly destroying crops and people are facing starvation. A fisherman called Colman (Donall O Healei) lives a mostly peaceful life with his wife and daughter, until his landlord increases his taxes. The ruthless and greedy Englishman was aware that the potatoes were rotting and that poor people such as Colman could hardly feed themselves, let alone pay out more money. His attitude epitomises that of the British Empire, who infamously allowed nearly two million people (nearly a quarter of the country’s population) to perish.

Colman decides to meet up with his landlord in the hope to find a peaceful solution, but violence unexpectedly erupts as a fellow Irishman decides to do justice with his own hands. The allegiance of certain Irishmen is very ambiguous. Many had joined the British army and fought for the Empire in the various wars overseas, therefore earning certain privileges. Will they once again stand by the reckless and murderous colonisers (and keep their privileges) or will they this time side with their very own people?

After the bloodshed, Colman runs away and lives inside a cave on the seashore, presumably hiding from authorities. He takes an orphan with him, a girl called Kitty. Progressively, the starvation escalates. Colman’s wife and child have passed away, and so have many locals. Potatoes are gone and all the barnacles have been eaten. Locals resort to extreme measures in order to feed themselves. An elderly man is killed for his blanket. All traces of humanity gradually vanish. Plus winter is approaching, which could seriously compromise Colman’s and Kitty’s meagre chances of survival.

Almost entirely spoken in Gaelic, Monster examines the most traumatic moment in the history of Ireland. It’s filmed on the dramatically craggy coast of the nation. The landscape is impressive yet threatening. The waters of the sea are just as turbulent as the lives of people. The soil is barren and damp. Beautiful Irish songs and chants add a nice and gentle touch to the tragic environment.

The narrative, however, has quite a few loopholes. It’s never entirely clear how Colman’s family died, how he ended up with Kitty, and why it took the child two years before she told him her name. There are also problems with make-up and casting. Some of the starving people (including Kitty) are the picture of health, with rosy cheeks and a fit figure. The horrific symptoms of diphtheria, dysentery, cholera, smallpox, the flu and many other diseases that were decimating the Irish people are not very realistic. As a result, the movie often feels artificial and contrived.

Monster showed in Competition at the 23rd Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival, when this piece was originally written. It’s in cinemas on Friday, October 15th (2021).

Land Without God

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The camera opens on a middle-aged lady, seated by a derelict wooden table, eyes floorward positioned, mouth tightly closed. Probed and persuaded by a offshoot voice, the interviewee speaks on the silent promise that she owes it to the members who will not speak. Cutting to the streets of Dublin, Gerard Mannix Flynn walks the ever-changing streets of Dublin, steering his viewers into a searing portrait of a bygone Ireland.

Ireland is central to this documentary, journeyed as it is in the hills of Galway, mindful as it presents the aged towns in Offaly. The film presides over its narrative in a naturalistic way, but it is the people that make this story so pressingly important. The Flynn family offer their generational perspectives over the decades of institutional abuse that left them scarred. Anne , sister to the narrator, compares their childhood abandonment to cancer, the inner effects of a faceless disease eating its way through the body.

Land Without God does proffer some moments of devastating pathos. Returning to St. Conleths Reform School, Mannix finds a bird sitting on the splintered debris. Tellingly, the bird flies off just as he recalls the bruisings, beatings and moments of sexual abuse he encountered as a child. Clawing his ageing hands over the tumbled walls, Mannix remembers the times he prayed to a God that mocked him as the starry-eyed bird flies unknowingly into the misty skies.

Guilt hangs over the school just as guilt hangs in the interviewees. Margaret, one of the younger family members, speaks with rancorous disgust of the the Catholic Church and the way it treated its youthful fashioners. The film’s audience is primarily an Irish one, one born before the eighties at that, yet the humanity is universal, as the ragged aftermath is keenly heard from participant to participant.

This documentary, however, is not without flaws. Some frames are amateurish in display, some musical cues intrusive in their entrance and occasionally the voice-over adds little to the proceedings. The import of the film isn’t in its execution, but in its existence, ensuring that one of the more shameful phases of recent Irish history is remembered.

Land Without God is in Irish cinemas right now. A UK release has not been announced yet.

A Bump Along the Way

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Thankfully, this isn’t a Northern Irish film about a girl growing up in The Troubles. Instead,this is a Northern Irish film about a girl growing up through her very own and personal troubles. Allegra (Lola Petticrew), a dewy-eyed teenager, walks through the streets that fought for identity in a way not dissimilar to how she fights for her identity. As she struggles through school, Allegra puts up with taunts mocking her Italian name and her care free mothers’ insouciant lifestyle. Described by her mother as 15-going-on-50, Allegra feels the burden of adulthood. As she fights for her coming-of-age, her mother Pamela (Bronagh Gallagher) admits to her of an impending birth, given to her by a man she barely knows anything about.

Gallagher is brilliant, but Petticrew is the real star of the piece. She walks by the water, wading the puddles her mother will soon face in a maternity ward. The silence works on Petticrew, starry-eyed as she looks to the beauty her best friends’ boyfriend holds. This silent discretion becomes one of public indiscretion as the cruel effects of alcohol loosen her tight-lipped tongue. Faced with her own embarrassment to match her mother’s, Allegra screams at her parent, agreeing with her dead grandmother that Pamela is an embarrassment.

Like most mothers do, Pamela takes the laceration from daughter by reminding herself of the struggles adolescence holds. Crueller lacerations come from the two men who gifted/burdened her with pregnancies, one reluctant to open his chequebook, the other flatly refusing to do so. The father of her unborn child pushes by her on pathways, her anxiety and discomfort rewarded neither by pardon nor apology. The father of her teenage daughter is a little better. Busying himself in Belfast, he boasts about his considerable success, yet finds little reason to visit Allegra on her 16th birthday. What starts off as a sickly sweet Richard Curtis affair soon turns into a feisty, fiery feminist movie with some dirtylicious pearls of wisdom about fatherhood.

And yet the film never veers from the dysfunctional into the disturbing. Between the two women, there is great love felt, not least when Allegra asks her mother the joys and trials pregnancy provides. Beautiful.

A Bump Along the Way is in cinemas Friday, October 11th.

Extra Ordinary

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In a rural Irish town, Rosie (Maeve Higgins) runs a driving school. One of her passengers, the eligible and handsome Martin (Barry Ward), turns to her to ask her to speak to his dead wife. The daughter of a clairvoyant, Rosie has ceased to use her powers since she accidentally killed her own father. Unknown to both of them, Christian Winter (Will Forte), a Rockstar hunched up in his castle long past his prime time, has entrapped Martin’s daughter in a spell, hoping to sacrifice her pure soul for returned chart success. Reluctantly agreeing to Martin’s request, Rosei re-opens her abilities to talk with ghosts, and by doing so, opens herself to love.

This is a very bizarre and twisted 90-minute comedy, which at one point sees a floating goat explode in front of a congregation of shocked passers-by. Elsewhere, a recycling bin haunts an old woman while Bonnie, Martin’s deceased wife, haunts both her widowed husband and Rosie. Just as Rosei learns to let herself go, so too does Martin, in an effort to rid himself of his wife’s image. These attempts to self-exorcise results in her presence within his body, Ward switching from bewildered husband to possessive, cigarette chomping wife with slapstick brilliance.

Less successful is Winter, the emaciated rock star desperate to return to the top of the charts. His flirtations with the dark arts leads to a litany of tiring phallic jokes, especially when his girlfriend refers to his magic implement as the “dick stick”. Much better is his rendition of Cosmic Woman, an eighties synthpop track which shows Winter crying out in excessive rock regalia. His treatment of women echoes the thinly veined misogyny eighties rock stars display on a daily basis, though the way in which he rids himself of his clawing girlfriend might shock some viewers.

And yet there’s a lot of heart to the film. A lowly image of Martin serenading his slumberous daughter (trapped in Winter’s spell) is strangely potent, while Rosie, lonely as she has been the whole film, falls delightfully in love with her companion. All of which leads to the haunting finale, as Winter serenades the dark lords to savour his virginal sacrifice. The libidinous punchline that ends the scene is a very funny one, though the hammy special effects are painful to sit through. There are too many dick jokes leading to the climax. Never the less, one of the more inspired Irish comedies since Sing Street (John Carney, 2016).

Extra Ordinary is out in Irish cinemas on Friday, September 13th. On VoD in the UK and Ireland in April!

Animals

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The glorification of male companionship has been celebrated in tragicomedies such as Withnail & I (Bruce Ronbinson, 1987) and Trainspotting (Danny Boyle, 1996). Animals, on the other hand, showcases the triumphant revelry between two young women, decadent in their communal taste for fermented depravity. Effortlessly translating Emma Jane Unsworth’s book from Manchester’s streets to the Irish capital, Animals zips with inspired zest, an energised exposition of elastic wit and inspirited storytelling.

Laura (the British born Holliday Grainger, complete with killer Dublin accent) fancies herself a writer, fancifully fantasising through voluminous bottles with the coquettish Tyler (Alia Shawkat). Their thirties fast approaching, the women see little reason to halt their precocious abilities to party, until love threatens to put these halcyon days to pasture. Minesweeping to Alphaville, Laura walks into the enigmatic Jim (Fra Fee), a precocious Ulster pianist whose scale painting conjures composites of satiated sexual desires. Between these silhouettes, a solitary fox walks, echoing the lonely poetry the film displays.

Befriending a musician, Laura looks to the emptiness of her novel, a work which has amassed 10 pages in as many years, at a time when her sister, once a free spirit who put fire to her vaginal hair in the name of drunken mirth, has gifted their parents a darling grandchild. Beside her stands Tyler, bohemian in outlook and lifestyle, hiding her mournful tears for a parent behind copious amounts of drugs and beer.

It’s not an exaggeration to say that the film works with cocaine speed, on cocaine ethics and cocaine rhythms, each shot more unsettling than the last. A communal poetry reading soon turns carnal, with powdered implements entering holes holier than nostrils, while a communal familial dinner is noted for some choice opinions on infertility. Tyler, proudly seeking pleasures from the world outside convention, turns to rhetoric to detail her every life. She chides her friend through an assemblage of wedding dresses as a bastion for idiotic men, while Laura prides her feminism on bringing modernity to the traditional wedding.

Animals is proudly liberal in its outlook. In a telling moment, Laura invites her fiancé to decide what to do with his body. The film makes use of both posteriors, Tyler walking to them with wine glasses to find her best friend in flagrante delicto beside a red brick wall.

Yet the film’s most intimate scenes concern the two women. Whether bed bound in conversation, rebounded in romantic interests or surrounded by Beatnik literati, the two saunter the Irish city with the contentment of deep friendship, one living through art, the other hoping to catch it. It really doesn’t get much better than this!

Animals is out in cinemas across the UK on Friday, August 2nd. On VoD in April 2020.

Animals is in our list of Top 10 dirtiest films of 2019.

The Hole in the Ground

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Sarah (Seána Kerslake) and her young son Chris (James Quinn Markey) move to a very rural Ireland seeking to break away from a recent past of unfortunate events. Their large and creepy house is as remote as it gets, completely isolated in the middle of the woods. And there’s plenty of renovation work to be carried out, and Sarah looks determined to do it on her own. One evening, Chris disappears into the woods. Sarah attempts to fetch him but instead comes across a giant hole in ground. Given its shape, one would assume it was caused by a meteor crash. Despite its enormous dimensions, the titular hole remains hidden amongst the dense vegetation, and other human beings seen unaware of it.

Chris eventually returns home on his own, but is behaviour has changed. He has become distant and cold. Sarah begins to believe that the boy who returned isn’t her son at all. An eerie old lady called Mareen had a similar experience with her son decades earlier, and he ended up dead. As a consequence, Noreen lost her sanity and is now found aimlessly wandering the countryside roas most of the time. Her figure is scarier than most paranormal entities. Could Sarah’s fate be the same? Will Chris end up dead, and Sarah deranged and catatonic?

The Hole in the Ground uses a very conventional suspense formula. Borderline supernatural events (such as Noreen’s bizarre appearances in the middle of the road) take place, repeatedly raising the question: is our protagonist going mad or is something truly supernatural taking place? Females are historically associated with hypersensitivity, hysteria and madness. They are the perfect victims of gaslighting. Plus, females are inherently ambiguous. The narrative arc of Hole in the Ground is effectively constructed upon this ambivalence (madness versus reason).

In the second half of the movie, the apparently supernatural events escalate. Chris has become so strong that he’s able to throw his mother across the kitchen. But did that really happen or was Sarah just dreaming? The director skilfully blends reality, dream and allegory in order to avoid answering this question and many others too soon. As you result, you will remain at the edge of the seat until the final resolution is unveiled. The film ending might raise some eyebrows and it certainly won’t answer all questions, but it’s worth sitting through the 90 minutes in order to find out what it is.

The excellent sound engineering and montage deserve a mention. The climaxes are cut just at the right point to something very trivial such as Chris slurping pasta and a cup of coffee being stirred, bringing your adrenaline level constantly up and down. The cinematography is quite impressive, and the sequences in the woods are particularly sombre and elegant.

The Hole in the Ground premiered at Sundance on Friday, January 25th. It is in cinemas across the UK on Friday, March 1st.

The Lodgers

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In thus classic ghost story set in rural 1920s’ Ireland, two orphaned twins share their house with sinister unseen entities that forbid them from leaving. Rachel’s encounter with soldier Seán sparks an insatiable urge within her and she acts to break the curse that traps both her and her twin.

This is a tale of two people growing in the natural world of the supernatural. As a model of the horror genre, The Lodgers still maintains the necessary chilly atmosphere an abandoned house should aspire. David Bradley, Charlotte Vega and Bill Milner star in a piece where desolate curtains flow without reason or rhyme, the ever growing cascades of stairs feels fittingly austere as the camera rises with the unease of Bunuel/Hitchcock of yore.

The hint of sexualised yearning of horror classics is pointed to as Rachel (Vega)’s encounter with war veteran Seán (Eugene Simon) sparks a sexual awakening within her. This is done with pertinence without resorting to crass performance and effect. David Turpin writes with cerebral prose and does his job of setting the horror within the claustrophobic interiors of a creaky house with nuance. The imaginative uses of angles in a shower of cavernous cuts and edits is also worth a mention. Cinematographer Richard Kendrick is the real star here.

Story-wise, the film shares much in common with Ryan’s Daughter (1970), David Lean’s seminal drama of an Irish married woman embarking on a sultry affair with a British soldier. Seán, a returning soldier, bears the brunt of being a British soldier in his hometown that no longer welcomes him. It’s all dubiously passé for a film set in 2018 and does little to advance the horror provoked in some of the genuinely scary scenes the film offers. It’s frustrating that another Irish film has a predominantly English cast, which takes from the realism the film should offer.

But there’s enough on display here to merit a watch from a visual standpoint. The decors are tastefully Gothic in design, the visually muted colours add to the viewer’s growing sense of unease and fear, while the film’s score is awash with Bernard Herrmann like cerebral strings, fitting for a horror film. With only his second film Brian O’Malley has proven that he knows how to put a niftily cut film together, but he is hampered by an unoriginal script and may be better off in future replicating a country he and I know with a better put together cast.

The Lodgers is out on DVD on Monday, June 25th.

Nails

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What if you wanted to scream but a machine prevented you from doing so? Dana (Shauna Macdonald) is paralysed on a hospital bed connected to a respirator, following a very tragic hit-and-run car accident. She can only communicate through a computer-synthesised voice (more or less à la Stephen Hawking, minus the metallic tones) generated by words she types on a keyboard. There’s a ghost haunting Dana, but no one believes it. Her doctors and family instead think that she is going insane. She is voiceless, both in the literal and the connotative sense of the word.

The first feature by the Irish filmmaker Dennis Bartok has all the ingredients of a good and conventional horror movie: a vulnerable victim who no one takes seriously, a sense of entrapment (on a bed in this case), empty corridors, plenty of blood and so on. The story development is also quite conventional: those who doubted Dana will inevitably pay a very high price.

The outcome is very effective: the suspenseful pace holds the film together throughout, and the jump scares and gruesome images progressively build up to great results. The director deftly makes use of various media (CCTV, computer cameras, etc), also a very common horror device nowadays. Some images from the film will likely materialise in front of you once you close your eyes, which is more or less what a horror movie is intended to do.

But Nails isn’t a perfect movie. The first problem is that the climax at the end of the movie has too many loose ends, and many of the narrative threads (such as infanticide and a visit to the hospital during Dana’s childhood) never weave together even into a vaguely coherent plot. And while Shauna Macdonald is very good, some of supporting actors are a bit iffy: sometimes it feels like they are a little late delivering their lines.

Nails is out in cinemas across the UK and Ireland on Friday, June 16th.

Click here for our review of A Dark Song (Liam Gavin), another Irish horror out this year and worth watching out for.

The Secret Scripture

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Does a satisfying ending have to include peace and happiness? Can a story stun audiences by embracing inner tragedy? These are some of the questions raised by Jim Sheridan’s The Secret Scripture. The Irish director’s career is dotted with major achievements such as My Left Foot (1989), The Field (1990) and In the Name of the Father (1993) and the expectations for this new feature film once again set in Ireland were high.

The Irish Catholic church has become infamous in history books for bigotry and repression, and The Secret Scripture creates an interesting portrait of the controversial institution. It follows the path established by movies such as Frear’s Philomena (2013) and Mullan’s The Magdalene Sisters (2002) – both expose abuse in the Catholic Church of Ireland – and adapts the original novel written by the Irish writer Sebastian Barry.

This is the story of Rose (portrayed by a stunning Rooney Mara and a superb Vanessa Redgrave) and is set in two different periods of the protagonist’s life. The first part depicts her lonely and solitary life in Belfast, where she lives with her sister. The troublesome priest Father Gaunt (Theo James) begins to develop an obsession with her. He is the key figure of the story, representing both the cruel manoeuvres of the clergy and the forbidden sexual desire. After a series of events, she is accused of murdering her own child while being locked in an asylum. The first part is thought-provoking and tense: the first 40 minutes develop a proper plot, but then as we move to the second half everything changes.

Move forward 25 years. We are still projected inside Rose’s troubled mind and feel her suffering, but the storytelling changes dramatically. The plot is desperately seeking a happy ending as well as an explanation for the events that the viewers have witnessed. All the dark and pleasantly unforeseen turns of the first timeline suddenly come undone. There is no room for ambiguity. After a series of unfortunate events, the universe has decided that Rose should be the protagonist of a series of fortunate coincidences.

This shift of tone doesn’t help the movie, instead making it implausible. Lots of storytellers always want to end on a positive and hopeful note, but sometimes it’s better to deliver a realistic and gripping outcome, instead of a far-fetched one. I not saying this film is not worth a shot, it just lacks audacity.

The Secret Scripture is out in the UK on Thursday, May 19th. You can watch the international film trailer right here:

Handsome Devil

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Ireland is a fast-changing nation. The profoundly Catholic country was the first one in the world to legalise gay marriage by the means of popular vote, despite fierce opposition from the Church. The society has suddenly come out of the closet, and cinema is keeping the closet doors open so that no one is left inside.

But gay marriage isn’t the only issue that matters to LGBT people. Handsome Devil touches is a very touching and moving gay drama, urgent in its simplicity, delving with two woes that remain pandemic: gay bullying in schools and LGBT representation in sports – the latter is often described as the last and most resilient stronghold of homophobia. The movie succeeds to expose both problems and the destructive consequences for the afflicted with a very gentle and effective approach.

Puny and nerdish Ned (Fionn O’Shea) and handsome sportsman Conor are forced to share a bedroom at their boarding school. Conor is strangely lonely and introspective, despite his looks and the popularity that the sports bestow upon him. He slowly begins to mingle with Ned, with whom the shares a taste for music. Their bond is then tested by the school authorities, with only the teacher Dan Sherry (Andrew Scott) supporting their friendship and musical affinity. Ned, Conor and Sherry are accomplices of each other’s sexuality.

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Partly narrated by the unabashed and unrepentant Ned, as if he was recollecting a dark chapter of his life and of his country’s history, Handsome Devil contrasts the grotesque masculinity often associated with rugby against the alleged artistic sensitivity of homosexuals. Of course the equations “straight = sports” and “gay = arts” are not accurate. Instead they have been pushed upon us in attempt balkanise and stigmatise people with diverse sexualities. Thankfully Ireland is now moulting its old layers of homophobia, and these equations are set to fall off with so many other prejudices.

The climax of the film towards the end is very powerful, and it’s guaranteed to bring you tears. It’s a turning point in the film, just like the gay marriage referendum in the country. In fact, this sequence is akin to the referendum in more than one way: it forces the film characters to cast a vote, just like Irish citizens did in 2015. Top it all up with Rufus Wainwright’s heartfelt wailing. This is the perfect gay tearjerker, without ever being corny and vulgar. This is a noble film about strong and noble characters.

Little note: this is not a film about sex, instead it’s a movie focused entirely on sexuality and lifestyle choices attached. There are no picante sequences, which may come as a disappointment to those who would like to have their libido tickled.

Handsome Devil is out in selected cinemas across the UK and Ireland on Friday April 28th (2017). on Disney + UK on Friday, July 29th. Also available on other platforms.