Death haunts the ruggedly beautiful Irish landscape in It’s In Us All, a confident feature-directing debut by the Northern Ireland-born actor, screenwriter and film-maker Antonia Campbell-Hughes. Not quite a crime thriller, not quite a horror movie, but sprinkled with formal hints of both, this suspense-heavy psychodrama is currently screening at Munich Film Festival following its prize-winning launch at SXSW in March. Though she sometimes seems a little tonally unsure, and arguably promises more mystery than she delivers, Campbell-Hughes has still made an absorbing and quiely gripping debut. Distribution deals are already in place for multiple territories.
Usually cast in brooding hot-head roles, rising British screen star Cosmo Jarvis shows a pleasingly different side to his acting range as Hamish Considine, an outwardly arrogant but inwardly brittle businessman on a sentimental journey to Ireland. His destination is a remote coastal corner of Donegal, a sacred location to the late bohemian mother he barely knew. On his way to make his peace with her death, he becomes complicit in another when his rental car collides with joy-riding teenagers on a misty rural road. Waking up in hospital, Hamish learns the shock news that the driver of the other car, 15-year-old Callum, died in the crash.
Obliged to stay longer than planned at his late mother’s eerily empty house while he recovers from minor but grisly-looking arm injuries, an initially cool-headed Hamish begins to struggle with complex feelings of shame and blame. The dead boy’s mother, played by Campbell-Hughes herself in a small but piercing cameo, angrily confronts him in public. But the passenger in Callum’s car, 17-year-old Evan (Rhys Mannion), seems almost suspiciously keen to connect with Hamish, pursuing him with a zeal that smacks of ulterior motives, not least his own crushing sense of survivor’s guilt.
As Hamish begins cautiously hanging out with Evan and his adolescent friends at bleak beach parties and hellishly extreme small-town techno clubs, he becomes increasingly nostalgic for the maternally-guided adolescence he never got to enjoy, blaming his divorced father, as played remotely by Claes Bang of The Square (2017) fame in a functional Zoom-call performance. The uneasy bond between Hamish and Evan is charged with unspoken homoerotic energy, but also something darker and more existential, the pair seemingly caught in the headlights of a classic Freudian death drive towards self-annihilation.
Kudos is due to Campbell-Hughes for managing to complete It’s In Us All under strained Covid conditions, with lockdown restrictions causing shoot delays, budget crisis meetings and scheduling problems, including the loss of her original leading man Jim Sturgess. Jarvis steps in to play Hamish with admirable conviction, his haughty entitlement undercut with flickers of self-doubt. Mannion is less convincing in one of his first screen roles, but he shows coltish promise. Piers McGrail’s elegantly sombre cinematography makes the unforgiving Donegal terrain a place of rocky, peaty, purgatorial beauty, while composer Tom Furse maps the inner landcape of these characters with his droning, disquieting score.
Venue: Munich Film Festival
Director, screenwriter: Antonia Campbell-Hughes
Cast: Cosmo Jarvis, Rhys Mannion, Antonia Campbell-Hughes, Claes Bang, Lalor Roddy, Pauline Hutton
Cinematography: Piers McGrail
Editor: John Walters
Music: Tom Furse
Producers: Emma Foley, Tamryn Reinecke
Production company: Pale Rebel (Ireland)
World sales: Sphere Films, Montreal
In English
92 minutes
