Paul Mescal and Emily Watson star in a new gothic Irish drama about dark familial secrets...
Director: Saela Davis & Anna Rose Holmer
Starring: Paul Mescal, Emily Watson
Running time: 101 minutes
God’s Creatures is a new A24 release set against the solemn bleakness of a remote Irish fishing village, following an emotionally depleted Aileen O’Hara, and the turbulence enforced upon her following the unexpected return of her estranged young son, Brian.
Brian O’Hara’s (Paul Mescal) unpromonted return acts as a rupture in the cold confines of the O’Hara familial structure. With serious sexual assault accusations quickly emerging upon his arrival back from his sudden work-based departure to Australia, Aileen’s adherence to the nurturing role of his mother is constrained by the mounting legal accusations against Brian.
The plot can be boiled down to her character being deeply conflicted. The moral conflict of navigating the social systems that should govern maternal bias. The internal conflict surrounding emotional expectations, and the fiscal conflicts that arise at the Oyster Clamming centre as result of Brian’s behaviour. Aileen becomes the emotionally torn epicentre of this film. With Emily Watson (who plays Aileen) delicately depicting the two pillars of the film’s narrative, society and shame.
The very essence of Aileen’s character is rooted in shame. As she desperately attempts to act in accordance with what is expected, her solemn shame silently soaks everything and everyone around her. Unable to even attend the one dingy pub in the town without creating an atmosphere of tense stress and motherly melancholia. Unable to interact with the other women in the town without the subject matter of her Son’s possible behaviour shadowing her conversations, unable to conjure up the maternal instinct to defend or even trust her son.
This nauseating need to conform with the social pressure of familial support acts as a depressive stressor in the already tired, difficult life of Aileen. Unable to make the legal proceedings go away, Aileen is never able to balance such systems of shame, alongside this inability to find calm amongst such familial upheaval. This imbalance sustains a sense of motherly sadness that is unrelenting in its misery throughout the entirety of the film. The reason Aileen’s internal fight with shame is fleshed out so masterfully is due to its relation to the wider cultural disarray of the film’s location: a small, cut off, industrial fishing town in Ireland.
With their rainy smoke breaks, tired eyes, fainting frail bodies, there is not a single character who hosts any semblance of vitality.
God’s Creatures explores the deep rooted strict social guidelines of modern day Ireland — Aileen and her family act as a microcosm for these wider issues: sustained emotional repression, long-standing resentment and grudges and the hard toil of working class manual labour.
Every character in this purposefully limited cast all represents a facet of the working class struggle and how it imbues itself into the misery of one's life. Everyone wrapped up in the draining tiredness of their long shifts that punctuate their long, miserable lives.
The female characters, who all work on the factory line of an Oyster Clamming factory, come to represent the monotony of repetitive, underpaid manual labour. With their rainy smoke breaks, tired eyes, fainting frail bodies, there is not a single character who hosts any semblance of vitality.
The male characters — all of which have some familial tie to the oyster fishing process — all in some way intrinsically connected to the one form of small economic prosperity their town offers. Often find themselves performing the ritual of a post-work beer. Engaging in the mechanics of a stale routine: dark early mornings, extensive workdays full of physically taxing labour, the pub at night-time for a few pints, all culminating in some form of late-night aggression between men, as they attempt to subconsciously inject any form of tangible purpose into their lives.
Throughout the film leitmotifs of religion, industry, and social secularity act as an aesthetic exposé on how male behaviour has consistently been minimised, in order to appropriately adhere to the psychosocial frameworks of Irish culture.
Over the 101 minutes of this psychologically taxing drama, flashes of the technical skills of up-and-coming directors — Saela Davis and Anna Rose Holme — coalesce to act as a stunning visual meditation on the emotional complexities that consume a small Irish fishing town.
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