Saela Davis, Anna Rose Holmer (2022)
The action takes place in a fishing village on the Irish coast – reviews of God’s Creatures that I’ve seen tend to stress the place is ‘windswept’. Saela Davis and Anna Rose Holmer’s drama, presumably set in the present day, starts and climaxes with a death at sea. Aileen O’Hara (Emily Watson), the main character, works as a shift manager at the local seafood processing plant. At a gathering that follows the funeral for the drowned son of one of her work colleagues, Aileen is astonished and delighted to see her own son, Brian (Paul Mescal), walk into the bar. He’s been in Australia for several years – why isn’t made clear although it’s soon obvious Brian always got on much less well with his father, Con (Declan Conlon), than with his mother. Brian’s sister, Erin (Toni O’Rourke), knows that, now he’s back, even her newborn son – her parents’ first grandchild – will have his work cut out to be the apple of Aileen’s eye.
Brian plans to revive the family’s oyster farm, abandoned since he went to Oz, but has no funds to get started. To give him a helping hand, Aileen steals bags of oysters from the plant with which to seed his traps – a theft witnessed by Sarah Murphy (Aisling Franciosi), who works with Aileen and was Brian’s girlfriend back in the day. It’s not long before Aileen breaks another commandment for the sake of her son. She and Brian go out together one evening for a drink at Dan Nell’s bar; when Sarah comes in, Brian starts chatting with her and Aileen returns home. At the plant next day – the same day that fungus is discovered on the oyster supply and oyster trading immediately suspended – Sarah faints. A couple of weeks later, she contacts the police and accuses Brian of raping her on the night they met in the bar. He claims he spent the whole evening at home, Aileen lies to confirm this and a preliminary court hearing finds insufficient evidence to send the matter to trial. Sarah is ostracised within the village for making the rape allegation and loses her job for repeatedly missing shifts in recent weeks. But her parting shot at the plant – referring to the oysters jiggery-pokery – starts other rumours going and Aileen is sent to Coventry by her co-workers. Despite becoming oppressed by guilty conscience, she still has to make a quantum leap (see below) to change her mind about Brian. The two of them take the family boat to the oyster plot and Aileen takes the opportunity to confront her son about the assault on Sarah. He won’t talk about it and what happens next ensures he never will. Realising the tide is rising, Aileen returns to the boat and heads back to shore, leaving Brian behind. After struggling briefly, he disappears beneath the waves.
God’s Creatures is a right kettle of fish – thanks chiefly to Shane Crowley’s screenplay. In terms of screen time, the main story is of unconditional mother love and its consequences. When Brian is accused of the assault, Aileen feels compelled to protect him without question. The ingrained prejudice which leads the village to dismiss Sarah’s allegation is, rather than a dramatic theme in itself, a context for the drama of Aileen’s developing moral dilemma. But Saela Davis and Anna Rose Holmer (who’ve collaborated on other projects but not previously shared the directing credit) change horses in the home straight. Not only does Brian’s death go largely unremarked upon in this close-knit community: Aileen herself is given next to no reaction to letting her son die – instead, she knocks on Sarah’s door and apologises for her actions. Sarah gets considerably more than the last word: the final five minutes of talk in the film consist exclusively of her stagy monologue about the ‘ghosts’ of the house and the village, that she knows it’s time to leave, etc. The camera doesn’t even show Aileen’s face as she listens to Sarah’s big speech. Once it’s done, there’s a wordless shot, which seems to go on for as long as the monologue, of Sarah driving away to a new life somewhere else. The mother-love-is-blind premise on which God’s Creatures depended is elbowed out by a theme with greater cultural traction and appeal: a young woman on the receiving end of a sexually predatory man and systemic misogyny decides enough is enough, and breaks free of the tyranny of brutal male entitlement.
Early on I sometimes struggled to make out what was being said but I clearly heard Aileen’s first interview with the Garda and didn’t believe my ears. She’s called to the local police station in the small hours. Garda Mike (Andrew Bennett) tells her the alleged assault took place ‘a couple of weeks back … on the night of the 18th April’ and asks if she can confirm Brian’s alibi. Aileen’s unhesitating ‘yes’ is striking. How can she be so instantly sure about a specific date more than a few days ago? Has Brian been at home with her every night? Garda Mike’s failure to ask these questions might seem to express the village’s sexist assumptions but, in that case, why did he – as Aileen points out – see fit ‘to drag me out in the middle of the night just to ask a simple question’? Either the police handling of the complaint is perfunctory or it isn’t: the film-makers have it both ways, purely for the sake of ‘dramatising’ the situation in which Aileen tells her pivotal lie. Although the script’s weaknesses certainly aren’t confined to this sequence, it was here (for me) that they came into clear focus.
The delay in Sarah’s contacting the police makes more sense. It reflects her awareness of how her claim is liable to be received locally and presumably means there’s no DNA evidence to support the accusation. (No circumstantial evidence either: Dan Nell (Enda Oates) saw Brian with Aileen and Sarah on his premises that evening but is disinclined to destroy the alibi.) What, though, causes Aileen finally to see and accept the truth about Brian? The answer has nothing to do with psychologically credible motivation: it’s a plot necessity to get the film-makers where they finally want to be – a destination that’s on trend but reached by an antique conveyance. This takes the form of another member of the O’Hara household I didn’t mention in the plot synopsis above. Day in day out, Paddy (Lalor Roddy) sits blank-faced and silent in his armchair: it isn’t clear (or I didn’t hear) what brought on his catatonic state, which has lasted ‘a good few years now’. I wasn’t sure either if he was Con’s father or elder brother. But I thought I recognised in Paddy a stock character in screen melodrama – someone who tends to know more than they’re letting on and, in good time, will break their silence. Although this only sort of happens in God’s Creatures, Paddy does come in handy.
On the morning of the court hearing, Aileen hears the sound of singing in the house and discovers that Paddy, encouraged by Brian, has briefly recovered his voice and still knows the words to one-of-the-old-songs. This astonishing event registers as no more than an opportunity for Aileen to gaze adoringly at her sensitive miracle-working son, never mind that they’ll soon be off to find out if he’s going on trial for rape. It looks as if Paddy, once he has sung, has served his purpose because the next thing he does is die. But there’s still his funeral to come. Mourners express their condolences to the family, lined up in the church; Sarah, when she reaches Brian, spits in his face. This isn’t enough to disillusion his mother – Aileen simply urges Brian not to retaliate – but all that changes in the bar after the service. Brian walks in with another girl (Isabelle Connolly) and has a fist fight with his father. The scales suddenly fall from Aileen’s eyes – her son must be a rapist after all. Shane Crowley, whose first feature-length screenplay this is, gets full marks for shameless non sequitur.
The BFI handout for this screening mostly comprised the film’s production notes, in which clichés come thick and fast from the word go. The opening sentence is, ‘Powered by quietly intense performances and incisive, exquisite filmmaking, God’s Creatures enters the life of a small, windswept Irish fishing village and a family whose bonds are as tumultuous as the sea upon which their survival depends’. To be fair to these notes, they convey a reasonable idea of the Davis-Holmer style. For a few minutes, the various, odd noises of work in the seafood plant are unnerving but the ominous sound design is increasingly overdone. The music (by Danny Bensi and Saunder Jurriaans) quickly announces impending doom and never lets up. The cinematography (by Chayse Irvin), especially in interior sequences, is another case of supposedly natural light getting to feel like unnatural darkness.
The only two good reasons for seeing God’s Creatures are the lead actors, though one of them is miscast. Emily Watson, now in her mid-fifties, is the right age for Aileen but not the right type. In the group of workers having a fag break outside the fish factory, Watson stands out as too classy. She makes a valiant and sustained effort to get inside Aileen’s skin – it’s an admirably committed performance – but the bright-eyed alertness this actress naturally projects makes Aileen seem too conscious of her instinctive allegiance to Brian. When they go out to Dan Nell’s for that fateful drink, it’s very striking that dolled-up Aileen and her son, who sometimes calls his mother by her first name, look as if they’re on a date. (It’s a wonder, once Brian transfers his attentions to Sarah, that Aileen quietly goes home – you almost expect scorned-woman fury from her on the spot.) Paul Mescal impresses again. The young man he’s playing is tediously familiar – chronically irresponsible prodigal son, shallow charmer with a black heart – but Mescal plays him with such sympathetic finesse that Brian, as you watch the film, is much less obvious than those behind the camera have any right to expect. I know it looks instantly contradictory to suggest that Emily Watson has the wrong kind of intelligence for her role and to commend her co-star for engaging so credibly with a cast of mind different from his own. But that’s what great screen actors (like Judi Dench, Meryl Streep and Ben Whishaw) do repeatedly. Let’s hope Paul Mescal gets to join their number.
11 April 2023
