The Dig

The land. We've an odd relationship with it. We see it as a living, mystical thing. We believe it controls us and our destiny. We need to own it. Road frontage is still a thing in 2019. It's tied into our self worth. We don't want to share and it turns us into selfish eejits. Some of our best stories, books, films and poems are about it. Our history lies beneath it. Plenty of other things lie beneath it too. Darkness, secrets, the stuff that will scar ya.

Ronan Callahan (Moe Dunford) has come home after 15 years away. The homestead is a wreck. His family is gone. He's a man alone in the world. Sean McKenna (Lorcan Cranitch) is trespassing on his land. He's looking for something beneath the turf of the Callahan bog. His life has been devoted to it since Ronan went away. No one is happy to see the long gone man return and a fiery confrontation is inevitable.

If last year's Black 47 was Ireland's first real western then The Dig is it's second. It drips with the trappings of the genre. Whiskey shots, barroom confrontations, lonely ranges surrounded by desolate barren countryside, simmering violence, lawmen who bend the rules, land disagreements, a wordless homage to a certain Paul Thomas Anderson film and pure rage. It's a bleakly beautiful watch but it definitely won't be for everyone. Like the westerns of old it's a slowburn affair that may test the patience of some but as the backstory of the characters onscreen is filled in piece by piece you'll find yourself gripped by a haunting tale of obsession and loss and the damage caused by not being able to let go.

There's a cast of four (Francis Magee & Emily Taafee round it out, both doing fine work) but it's really a two hander about Ronan and Sean. Two fellas torn to bits by their actions. Men at each others throats who realise they both have a common purpose. Dunford and Cranitch are excellent, a pair of brooding bastards, neither with much to live for who have have found something to cling to. Watching them going at their work will wither you. The damp, the cold, the bleeding blisters. You'll feel every bit of their misery. It's like John B.Keane met John Ford and they had a angry little baba, a little ball of Irish rage, one that will bring to mind horror stories from The Troubles especially.

And because of that it's almost too grim. Even the colour palette will bring you down. The climate onscreen here makes Angela's Ashes look like it was set in Majorca. A streak of that black comedy we do so well would have made it all a little bit more palatable but we get no respite as the story unfolds in ways I did not see coming. The ending is OTT but it doesn't come from nowhere and it will make you look back on what you've already seen from a fresh point of view. This is writer Stuart Drennan's 2nd film and directors Ryan and Andy Tohill's debut feature and it all feels very accomplished. It's a movie that taps into our unique psyche. That slow to forgive, quick to anger core most of us are afflicted with. It must be all that turf smoke.

The Dig is really worth a watch. Annoyingly it bypassed the vast majority of Irish cinemas but it's now available to stream on https://www.volta.ie/. I just wish distributors would take more of a chance with Irish films in cinemas though. There's an audience for them if people get the opportunity to go. We love our aul bit of misery.