The Irish film-maker Robert Manson has gone back to his native Wicklow for this flawed, intriguing, indulgent movie with a touch of Kafka. It’s an experimental piece, drifting and dreamlike – though declining to let you know if it is a good dream or a bad dream – shot in black and white, with little bursts of colour Super 8.
David (Conor Madden) is a nondescript guy attempting to leave what appears to be a featureless little town. He is trying to catch a ferry, but keeps getting told he has the wrong ticket or he’s at the wrong terminal. (His passport is mysteriously of the old-fashioned variety.) An enigmatic woman called Rosa (Jeanne Nicole Ní Áinle) accosts him with weird questions and odd observations about which of the people they can see around them are still alive. Is she a dream he is having? Is he a dream she is having? Are they a dream someone else is having?
A garrulous taxi driver, Les (Mark Doherty), then takes them on unexplained excursions to nowhere very explicable. At one stage, after some drinks in a pub, David’s reflection in the mirror turns into someone else (played by Dermot Murphy). This could be his younger self, though he doesn’t look all that much younger – an alternative self, perhaps?
It doesn’t quite hang together but there are startling moments, especially when David chances upon a front parlour in which people are preparing to attend his mother’s funeral (he will encounter the funeral procession later). Clearly, he is on a mission to escape painful and unhappy memories that create bureaucratic and psychic obstacles to being forgotten. It may not entirely work, but there is a real creative intelligence here.
• Holy Island is released on 14 October in cinemas
