SALTWATER

Directed by Conor MacPherson. Starring Peter McDonald, Brendan Gleeson

It is normally my responsibility, as a film critic, to communicate to you some inkling of what the film under review is actually about. Unfortunately, in the case of Saltwater, this is utterly impossible: it is the most meaningless, meandering, incoherent mess Irish cinema has spewed forth since the recent Liam O'Mochain self-biopic The Book That Wrote Itself, and extremely fucking nasty to boot.

An unrepentant exercise in misogynistic, scatological humour (without the actual humour) there is something here for everyone to be repulsed by, what with the gratuitous rape scenes, gratuitous diarrhoea scenes and gratuitous vomiting scenes.

Our repugnant hero (McDonald) uses the fact that his Italian seaside cafe-owning dad is in hock to the local bookie/loan-shark (Brendan Gleeson) as an excuse to justify armed robbery of the latter's premises. Along the way, he manages to endear himself to the audience by raping the object of his little brother's affections, in a scene which outdoes anything ever committed to celluloid in terms of pure pass-the-sickbag perversion.

He also strikes up an unlikely friendship with a womanising UCD lecturer, who is almost his equal in terms of noxious repugnance. In fact, the pair are so unbelievably unappealing that the aforemetioned loan-shark bookie, and the nauseating female garda who investigates said robbery, actually assume the position of the film's moral centre.

What with my not being a regular at any of the local theatres, it may indeed be the case that Saltwater's director (acclaimed playwright Conor MacPherson) represents the future of Irish cinema. But on this evidence, he not only needs to stick to the day job - he must have a barring order to stay at least fifty miles from a film-set imposed upon him post-haste.

The filmic equivalent of a Bernard Manning-meets-Margaret Thatcher porno, Saltwater may not quite cut it as the worst film of all time: it's a film of sorts, insofar as it has opening and closing credits, and something resembling a script. But hateful misogyny this extreme hasn't been exposed to humankind since the last Carnivore album, and anyone who dares go see it is implored to fortify their guts well in advance.

Utterly fucking disgusting.