Rialto

Rialto debuted online last night as part of the Galway Film Fleadh because all physical screenings had been cancelled due to the ongoing Covid-19 crisis. The film opens with a middle aged man walking between cargo containers and noisy heavy machinery to his office in Dublin's docklands. In there his phone rings but you can't hear his voice or the voice of his colleague while everything else is still audible. Is this a film making choice? Is this film going to be a commentary on Irish men feeling like they are voiceless in this modern age? Nope, it's a sound error. Ok. 90 minutes later the fault had been fixed and Rialto was ready to go again. Was it worth the wait? It was indeed.

Two men face each other in a bathroom stall. One, Colm (Tom Vaughn-Lawlor) a closeted married man is scared and hyperventilating. The other, Jay (Tom Glynn-Carney), a young hustler is demanding cash for a sexual encounter organised over a hook up app. The encounter goes wrong and life becomes even more stressful for Colm, a father of two with the twin spectres of redundancy and his father's recent death hanging over his head. His existence is starting to crumble and his wife Claire (Monica Dolan, quietly devastating) is beginning to notice it too.

Rialto isn't a fun watch. Not one bit. It's a stressful account of a life in free fall, a story of threatened and toxic masculinity, a look at what happens when you don't deal with the things inside your head. The film gets it's title from where Colm's mother lives, the place where all his problems started. He can't cope with her grieving over the loss of her partner, he's openly hostile towards her in places, she's going through the worst time of her life and he doesn't care. Yet you can't bring yourself to hate him for it. He's clearly troubled, a bag of cans on a park bench being his form of self care. Visits to a younger male prostitute being his therapy. Colm's broken and he just wants to be whole again. His journey and rebirth is not an easy watch but it's a compelling one.

We all know Tom Vaughn-Lawlor from Love/Hate. His Nidge, the bastard you couldn't help but enjoy. Here every single bit of the character who made him famous is gone. He plays Colm as a shell of a man, hollow, growing more and more ragged as the movie plays out. As Springsteen once said "In the end what you don't surrender, well the world just strips away." It's a mighty performance, one that never feels like acting. A man alone in the world, while surrounded by his family. Grasping the small bit of intimacy he can get with both hands. The man he's grasping at is played by Tom Glynn-Carney. His Jay comes across initially as a vicious little scrote, but then you realise his actions, just like Colm's, are driven by need. It's a nicely layered turn by Glynn Carney, who by the way is English but who absolutely nails his Dublin accent.

Note the crucifix. Old Ireland's idealisms still haunt us

There's a small moment about halfway through Rialto where Colm is standing on top of a loader in the docks, looking down at the place he's devoted his life to. From a distance he looks like a dot, insignificant in the midst of all this metal devoted to loading and unloading cargo. He looks alone in the world, pathetic and tiny. It's a shot that encapsulates life for a lot of men in this modern age. Men who feel alone and confused by how their lives have turned out. Colm's issues stem from his past, a past barely hinted at and one of my favourite things about this film. The stuff left unsaid and summed up in a tiny part played by Ger Ryan. You have to like a film that lets you read between the lines.  Director Peter Mackie Burns and writer Mark O'Halloran have created a bit of a stunner that doesn't insult it's audience's intelligence.

Rialto is available to rent here at the moment and should be getting a cinema release later in the year. It's really worth watching.