Seven years ago, young Brooklyn-based writer-director Anna Rose Holmer unveiled her sparkling feature debut The Fits, a boldly original dance-themed coming-of-age story that earned rhapsodic reviews at its Venice pemiere. Belatedly returning to build on that early promise, Holmer has chosen a broader and darker canvas with God’s Creatures, this time co-directing with long time collaborator Seala Davis, who served as co-writer and editor on The Fits. Based on a screenplay by Shane Crowley, this brooding family psychodrama features a high-calibre cast led by Emily Watson alongside rising Irish screen stars Paul Mescal (Normal People) and Aisling Franciosi (Game of Thrones).
One of a raft of premieres that prestige US indie A24 are launching in Cannes, God’s Creatures is a more conventional offering than The Fits, a solidly middlebrow study of repressed emotion and submerged trauma with a faintly musty air of vintage Scandinavian social realism. Take away the Celtic trimmings and this gloomy slow-burner could almost be a vintage slab of Ibsen or Strindberg. A handsome package overall, the film lapses into heavy-handed solemnity at times, making it more earnest art-house fodder than attention-grabbing commercial prospect. Holmer confirms her much-admired debut was no fluke, but this is still an overly mannered and portentous sophomore effort.
The setting is a small fishing village perched on a remote corner of Ireland’s rugged west coast, notionally around Kerry in the south, though the shooting location was actually in the more mountainous Donegal to the north. In this hard-scrabble maritime community, weather is extreme, the menfolk are tough, and the women even tougher. Watson plays Aileen O’Hara, a middle-aged mother working the factory floor at an industrial oyster processing plant. A flinty, chain-smoking matriarch with a sharp tongue but a big heart, Aileen lives a life of unexamined semi-contentment with her taciturn husband Con (Declan Conlon), ailing father Paddy (Lalor Roddy) and grown-up daughter Erin (Toni O’Rourke). Franciosi co-stars as one of Aileen’s co-workers, Sarah Murphy, a fragile young beauty with a flair for public singing.
The sea is a vengeful force of nature in this purgatorial landscape, frequently claiming the lives of fishermen and amateur oyster farmers. But one day, as the whole village mourns yet another drowning victim, Aileen is delighted by the surprise reappearance of her long-absent prodigal son Brian (Mescal), mysteriously returning home from Australia. A secretive and soft-spoken charmer, Brian still bears a grudge against his father over some unspoken ancient feud, with hints of violence in their history. But he enjoys slipping smoothly back into his childhood role as his mother’s golden boy.
Basking in the sunshine of her adoration, Brian takes Aileen out dancing and drinking, the pair more like lovers than parent and child. The aura of lightly eroticised, Oedipal tension between them is subtle yet tangible. But Aileen’s unconditional love is tested to the limit when Brian is accused of a violent crime. While the men of the village close ranks around him, she is torn, struggling with the shock realisation that her beloved son may have a more malevolent side, which is mirrored in the ingrained misogyny of this conservative backwoods community.
A heavy pall of Nordic gloom hangs over God’s Creatures, at times threatening to tip the entire project over into overblown gothic melodrama. The tone is remorselessly dour, the plot mechanics clunky, and the protagonists painted in broad monochrome strokes. Ticking the full Soulful Celtic Angst checklist, these fatalistic peasant folk have music in their bones and poetry in their hearts, but they behave in emotionally stunted and morally blinkered ways that feel more dramatically convenient than psychologically true. Even the screenplay’s few stabs at humour fall oddly flat for Irish characters, usually so rich in wry self-irony. Holmer and Davis undoubtedly have serious points to make here about toxic masculinity and dysfunctional families, but boy do they make heavy work of delivering these fairly banal insights. A final act of karmic justice, heavily telegraphed beforehand, borders on the preposterous.
Even so, this tragedy-tinged saga is still modestly effective as noir-ish melodrama, beautifully shot and skillfully acted, with cinematographer Chayse Irvin making superb use of the Donegal coastline as a grand canvas for elemental emotions. A spare, haunting, avant-folk score by The Fits alumni Danny Bensi and Saunder Jurriaans accentuates the lonely grandeur of this majestic backdrop. Since his breakthrough role in the hit TV drama Normal People, Mescal has developed a strong line in quietly intense, finely calibrated performances that hint at deep interior wounds. Franciosi is also a compelling screen presence, both as actor and singer, while Watson remains impressively focussed as she wrestles with a range of Irish-adjacent accents. As a high-minded work by two feted young female film-makers, God’s Creatures deserves to be taken seriously, just not as seriously as it takes itself.
Directors: Seala Davis, Anna Rose Holmer
Cast: Emily Watson, Paul Mescal, Aisling Franciosi, Lalor Roddy, Toni O’Rourke
Screenwriter: Shane Crowley
Producer: Fodhla Cronin O’Reilly
Cinematography: Chayse Irvin
Editing: Jeanne Applegate, Julia Bloch
Music: Danny Bensi, Saunder Jurriaans
Production companies: Nine Daughters (UK/Ireland), A24 (US), BBC Films (UK), Screen Ireland (Ireland)
Wold sales: A24
Venue: Cannes Film Festival (Directors’ Fortnight)
In English
100 minutes
