Wide Open Spaces

Tom Hall, lately of Batchelor’s Walk, returns to feature film making with black hearted whimsy and gloomy exteriors. Father Ted creator Arthur Mathews’ characteristically Hiberno-centric screenplay shares some DNA with the purgatorial comedy of Magnus Mills’ The Restraint of Beasts; Ardal O’Hanlon and Ewen Bremner are two ne’er-do-wells on the run from disgruntled eBay users when they wind up in a windswept hellhole presided over by Owen Roe’s dodgy businessman, a Michael O’Leary worshipper with plans to open Ireland’s first famine theme park.

It gets worse. Our fugitives are saddled with debt collecting duties, entrusted to paint a coffin ship pink and caught in the crossfire between their cute hooer boss and his doting landlady stalker, Morwenna Banks. The final straw comes when crooked politician Gerard McSorley shows up with TV reporter Kelly Campbell on his tail.

Watching these eccentric happenings unfold in defiantly miserabilist terms, one can’t help but think of the phrase ’selective appeal’. The stark mise-en-scène, the Beckettian mean streak, the absurdity amounts to something very singular, very peculiar. Yet beneath the grotesquery, there are familiar beats. The interplay between Messrs. Hanlon and Bremner – doing intellectual malcontent and blissful ignoramus, respectively – is classically constructed and executed with aplomb; the damp existentialism is carefully counterweighted by outbreaks of zaniness.

You won’t be bored, at any rate. File it alongside A Film With Me In It and let’s call it a sub-genre.