The fish processing plant is a character in the film God’s Creatures (Saela Davis & Anna Rose Holmer, 2022). It is the creature of a relentless and cold God. The belts trundle, the knives gut and fillet, the vans come and go, the plastic crates clash and pile, the hoses sluice the concrete floors. Women in overcoats and hair-nets work ceaselessly.
When you enter the plant, you know what you’re getting and it’s not joy. And it’s not easy. Little of the riches passing through it, in the form of oysters, mackerel and salmon torn from the seas roundabout, stay in the hands of the women working there. What heroics there are in the film are performed by the women in the plant, who enter it fresh-faced, lithe and innocent, but who are soon rounded and wizened by the drudge of wealth-making for others.
Each time a packet of mackerel fillets drops into a shopping trolley, ghosts of the women swirl about. Images from the fish processing plant echo in the great Russian film Leviathan.
Faces make films. Aileen O’Hara’s (Emily Watson) face is this film. Seen from many angles and lights, usually low, her face is a vivid world, journeying from birthing to dying. In the climactic scene, we see her from above, as she lies distraught in the bottom of a small boat. You know what you’re seeing. And what you’re not seeing.
The voices and accents are breac-Ghaeltacht, rooted in a coastal area in Cork or Kerry, where Irish persists as the sea does, though it too has been extracted and trammelled. The film was shot at the other end of Ireland, principally in tightly-bound northerly coves and along the coast around Glencolumbcille in west Donegal. The location is an elemental character in the film, like the fish plant. It is a heaving, living presence, one of God’s creatures too, a forceful presence, not merely a moving backdrop, as in The Banshees of Inisherin.
Men in the film exist on a spectrum from lout to brute, producing surly silence, false laughter at crass jokes, hard graft and violence. Their work is outside, on the pier and on the sea, sites of threat and insecurity. The women cope and care, cover and cower in the face of danger and power.
It is an Irish kitchen tragedy, set in the 1980s (?), suggested by the interior design, the cars and the punt notes exchanged. There is so much cigarette smoke the cinema chokes. It could be a re-working of J.B. Keane’s Sive, if that play had ended differently.
You enter the sea at the film’s opening and you never leave it. Its sound, colour, depths and the way light works off it are in every frame, even among the interiors of workplace, home and pub. Its darkness pervades.
A tidal metronome and a drumbeat pace the film.
Attachment and lies drive the tough drama. While the stakes are very high, they are presented straightforwardly and with terrific force. Perhaps the film expects too much of itself. Might another, deeper layer strengthen it further?
Erin O’Hara (Toni O’Rourke), seen breast-feeding her baby, is the stoical binding of the film. Her actions knit the plot together. She has no illusions about her brother, Brian, who she says still sucks on their mother’s teat. Brian O’Hara (Paul Mescal) is prodigal and errant, returning from Australia, surprising everyone. He is the penniless and scavenging son. He tells nothing of his time away, simply picking up the life he abandoned. Sarah Murphy (Aisling Franciosi) falls foul of Brian O’Hara’s return.
The acting by all the principals is on the front-foot and gripping, in particular from Watson and Mescal. All the attributes of fine screen-acting – facial expression, voice, gait, stance, body-shape, position and many more – are on display. The work of Lalor Roddy as the dementia-burdened grandfather, Paddy, is a small triumph of grim catatonic behaviour, leavened with a charming scene with his grandson Brian, when they sing together. There are songs throughout, mourning lives and commonplace deaths.
Mescal recently played Stanley in a stage production of A Streetcar named Desire by Tennessee Williams. His performance was praised. Comparisons with the early Marlon Brando will quicken following his performance here.
Two queries:
Could the metronome be set slightly faster?
The screenplay dialogues by Shane Crowley and Fodhla Cronin Ó’Reilly (who also produced) are rooted and believable. Could the “explaining” speech in the penultimate scene be cut/re-written/done without?
A road-trip away from the fishing village is a version of the classic flight-ending of many films from rural Ireland. Lankum’s stunning treatment of The Wild Rover is an inspired lament over the last scene and the final credits. It has the sea’s metronome in it. It ties the film to the viewer on leaving.
Best to know what you’re going to get when you enter the cinema to watch God’s Creatures. And you do get it. The images remain. The story holds, beyond the fade.
Recommended.
God’s Creatures (Saela Davis & Anna Rose Holmer, 2022)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fyOk1QVDlsI
Leviathan (Andrey Zvyagintsev, 2014)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UEs_dFSba4c
The Wild Rover (Lankum, 2019)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5rukIHD7rNY
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