Luke: In new Irish-language film, a chance encounter leads woman down dark road of revenge

A chance encounter leads a troubled woman down the dark road of revenge in a new Irish-language psychological thriller, An Mháthair, from director Vincent Gallagher and writer Seán Keeley. 

This short film opens on a woman (Simone Kirby) looking down at undulating dark water. Reflections from the streetlights overhead glisten white for a moment before being swallowed by the bobbing waves.

The woman discards something in the blackness of the water and trudges into town. Her head hangs down and she moves like a ghost. Like she doesn’t exist, or doesn’t want to.

In a pub the barman greets her by name, Mary, and she takes a seat while he prepares her usual. 

Another “usual” occurrence happens when she tops up her gin and tonic with a bottle from her handbag. The barman turns a blind, rolling eye to the sound of the bottle unscrewing. 

Gallagher follows both Mary and the barman, finding focus on their faces. In the expressions they don’t show one another. Those scowls or darts of the eye that tell the audience of an understanding and a deep sadness in their acquaintance.

The relative solitude of the bar room is broken when a group of young lads visiting from Dublin rock in and get shirty when they’re refused service. 

One of the group, feigning understanding, slams his hands on the bar before heading off. The barman is startled, and the lad leaves happy in his mischievous menacing.

This is the first of many unsettling moments in An Mháthair, all involving a sudden burst of sound and violence. Gallagher builds into the film a growing sense of dread and discomfort. 

The trial

The script was based on an incident in the director’s own life, and works within that tension and wariness of the unknown and unseen.  

Gallagher relies on misdirection and reframing of previous action. The film plays with what is known and what we think is known. The action moves from the grounded to the uncanny. 

Playing into this is the script’s use of Irish throughout flashbacks and present-day sequences – even in spots where it sounds odd or incongruous. But Irish and its prevalence locks us in with Mary’s perspective and worldview. 

The diegesis of the film becomes hyperreal.  Places and situations read as real  through CCTV footage and mundane locations and framing. 

Court scenes play out in the manner of courtroom sketches, framing faces as in the bar. The looks between heartrending speeches. Snatches of time and emotion. 

All are spoken in a hyper-specific, somewhat stilted, delivery that rhymes with the dreamy feeling throughout the film. 

Memories where emotion is laid bare and made more explicit than ever before. We are witnessing Mary’s subconscious come to life.

The incident at the bar flashes Mary back to a time she’d like to forget but never can. Her son is involved in a violent assault and we see the aftermath of the attack and subsequent trial.

Testimony and courtroom sequences are mixed with further flashbacks and cutaways that loop and intertwine to a poetic view of a harmonious mother-son relationship but short and irreconcilably changed.

Gallagher works these sequences in a way that highlights the mistiness of memory. Purposefully shimmying and disorientating at times.

Revenge 

That woozy, tense stylisation extends back into the present day as Mary, equipped with a knife swiped from the pub’s charcuterie board stalks the group from the bar through the town.  

Reds and oranges from brake lights and street lamps dance on Mary’s face and on the figures she follows through alleyways and winding streets.

The red contrasts hard with the blacklight blue glow of a nightclub that sees one of the men hassle a girl and her boyfriend. 

Determined to do more harm, the group follows them out of the club after their altercation is broken up by a bouncer.

Mary pursues both groups from afar. 

The action then culminates in a surprising reveal that runs up against the limits of revenge, as these stories so often do. It also calls into question cinematic perspective, framing and the preceding action.

Gallagher builds the need to rematch and reassess the film and its psychology into the viewing experience. The viewer is made to construct a point of view that exists apart from the one offered up by cinematic language and form. 

An Mháthair cleverly and bluntly subverts expectations, and with its twist, opens a new way of seeing its narrative. It’s not subtle, but it is effective and like the preceding split seconds of violence.

A moment, one moment, another “one” moment, that changes everything for its characters and for the film's audience.

A final shock out of nowhere. Something that Gallagher wants us to expect, but knows it's never truly possible to do so. 

An Mháthair recently screened as part of the TG4/Screen Ireland Gearrscannáin: Tús & Céim Eile Showcase at the Galway Film Fleadh. Further screenings are forthcoming.