There’s a moment in Lance Daly’s The Halo Effect when you suddenly realise that despite the melancholic presence of Stephen Rea, there are even more unfortunate looking wretches up there on the screen. It’s a rather nasty shock, I can tell you, yet the film is far from being a mirth-free zone. Though set in a revoltingly grimy chipper and featuring a seemingly endless parade of scumbags and downtrodden ne’er-do-wells, The Halo Effect trades in the same warm prole humour as last summer’s Adam And Paul and it definitely isn’t - as writer/director Lance Daly was keen to stress - stuck in the Loachian doldrums.
“The thing about kitchen sink films is that everyone is always struggling”, explains Lance. “In Halo the characters know they have fuck all, but they’re happy scoring little victories and laughing off the situation.”
In addition to tempering the grot with good-humour, the film also trades on delightfully surrealist moments, like a dog getting his stomach pumped and a midget shouting from a window. No surprise then that Lance nurses an admiration for Fellini. Still, though Fiona O’ Shaughnessey’s unhinged seductress probably wouldn’t look out of place at a fountain’s edge, few could confuse the rest of Halo’s losers with the cast of La Dolce Vita. There’s Rea’s debt-ridden gambler, Fatso, the proprietor of the health-endangering take-away at the centre of the film’s universe. His already thin livelihood is under constant threat from strung-out window-smashing slobs, debt collectors and an utterly useless staff including Simon Delaney’s obnoxious would-be Lothario, Grattan Smith’s mousy delivery boy and Kerry Condon’s cross-town tourist shutterbug.
Though Rea’s Fatso might rightly be described as put-upon – hell, even his inappropriate moniker was inherited from the greasy spoon’s previous owner – he retains the aura of a covert humanitarian. In between handing out blankets to the homeless, administering CPR to the OD cases in the bathroom and grumbling about same, though, he’s running up gambling debts in a manner to rival Mike Skinner. Rea’s decadent miserabilism and paradoxical warmth offsets the part nicely, though Lance does point out that ‘miserabilism’ is a word not likely to thrill the actor.
“I think he’s trying to get away from the whole hang-dog tag,” says Lance. “Obviously he has a lot of character in his face and he’s always been impressive in tragic roles, so it becomes inevitable that people see him in a certain way. I think Fatso was a way for him to almost subvert those expectations because there’s a lot of hidden things about the character and a sense of fun.”
Nevertheless, the script does heap problems upon its grizzly protagonist, yet predictably he treads water rather successfully. All around him, though, is absolute chaos, what with the faithless preacher (Mick Lally) on the run, the burger-addicted junkyard dog, the blindfold motorcycle runs and the vicious debt-collecting squads.
“There’s a line in the movie,” says the depressingly young Mr. Daly, “where Fatso says that it’s not the gambling that’s the problem, it’s the not-winning. That ties in with the idea of portraying people who understand that their lives are awful, but will keep going on anyway – not struggling against their circumstances exactly, but being resilient.”
Like Lance’s debut film, the commendably guerrilla school Last Days Of Dublin, Halo offers a wealth of observational material and keen archiving instincts partly inspired by the director’s own, ahem, undercover stint in the food delivery sector. Still, this less than glamorous employment not only helped inspire The Halo Effect, but also helped the then 23 year-old see Last Days Of Dublin through. A wistful monochrome tale of, well, dossing, Last Days was made on half a frayed shoestring budget, and saw Lance and his cohorts shooting in an impromptu (and technically illegal) style with all the necessaries – equipment, cast, crew – bundled into the back of a van.
“This time around I set practically everything in the chip-shop, so that kept the costs down, something I obviously know about,” he smiles. “And that meant we weren’t racing around. I could think more about the look of the film because the shoot was almost completely done in a Dorset Street chipper.”
Of course, there’s a real sense over the two films of the director trying to capture something of the city that is passing. Like Wong War Wai’s end-of-the-century laments for a Hong Kong about to be lost forever, Lance seems to be in the business of assembling little cinematic time-capsules.
“Well, I look around at new Dublin”, says Lance, “and I’m sure there are stories out there, but everything is too anonymous looking to be a great source of inspiration. A lot of what I write is me just working things out, and then feeling paranoid that everyone will spot them. But Simon’s character was based on a guy I worked with in the, em, food industry, who lived with his ma, yet had prostitutes coming in to visit him at work. I suppose I’m just an eavesdropper at heart.”

The Halo Effect is released November 19th.