Pat Chambers

Contains spoilers I's say this film is movie critic bait that flatters itself and its audience with an air of 'masterpiece'. There are lots of great ingredients, whose presence make the film watchable, but they're not combined with deftness or attention to detail. There's no coherent whole. The film conjures the atmosphere of a Maupassant short story, except that it's looooooong and lacking the sharp edges of a well-crafted plot. It riffs on Beckett-style theatre of the absurd, but there's not enough balance between comedy and existential brutality to keep the audience engaged. It's beautifully shot; however, the cinematography doesn't make for any complex relationship between the characters and their environment - they're isolated, and it's unusually dry and mild... that's about it. The old woman is a kind of gothic embodiment of death, or she might be anyway... she just kind of parachutes in. The acting is as good as it can be, and there are some great shots of the Irish coastline. To a limited extent, these two factors make the film watchable and enjoyable. But the piece doesn't hold together at all. It doesn't really work as an exploration of depression, as the events and relationships fundamentally lack realism. If it's a gothic/fantastic tale with existential themes, why make it so dour and plodding? Why does Colm keep cutting his fingers off? Why is he trying so bizarrely hard to create a reality?.. It's the film/plot trying to convince you that what you're seeing must be profound. Noone would cut their fiddle fingers off with shears in a film with no intellectual value! This is a film that a lot of people will walk out the cinema carefully telling themselves they loved.