This film, from screenwriter Shane Crowley and co-directors Saela Davis and Anna Rose Holmer, is a tense cine-ballad of guilt and shame. It is set on a remote coastal village in Ireland where there is a precarious living to be made from fishing and oyster farming and the wind’s howling creates an unearthly and doom-laden atmosphere.
This is a movie which has some dramatic redundancy and is sometimes submerged too deeply in its own sense of tragic destiny. But it is fiercely acted by its excellent cast, including Emily Watson as Eileen, the careworn mum who has been deeply affected by a prodigal-son drama in her life. The oedipal element here may have taken some inspiration from David Siegel and Scott McGehee’s 2001 drama-thriller The Deep End with Tilda Swinton as the protective mother taking desperate steps for her son. The presence of Watson in this film, along with its sombre, almost ritualistic singing scenes, brought back for me a tiny echo of Lars von Trier’s Breaking the Waves.
