Arracht

There's a strange smell in the air. One so bad the sea winds can't keep it at bay. It's the stench of potato blight, the stench of death. Life in 19th century Connemara was always tough and now the one crop the people living there can rely on is rotting in the rocky fields where they live. Doubling down on the misery are the rent increases the Anglo-Irish landlords are demanding. Colmán Sharkey (Dónall Ó Héalaí) has had it. Without potatoes he can't feed his wife Margaret (Elaine O'Dwyer) and son or make poitín to sell for his rent. After a shaky run in with a debt collector he heads inland with his brother Sean (Eóin Ó Dubhghaill) and an ex soldier called Patsy (Dara Devaney) to try to reason with the man demanding his money. He's willing to negotiate but Patsy, having spent some time in the British army, has nothing but contempt for the man in the big house. Things don't go well. 

Arracht finally hits Irish cinema screens after two years on the shelf and it was definitely worth the wait. Even if bad memories of schooldays ruined your grá for the mother tongue there's something powerful about hearing it and seeing it on the big screen, especially in this context. You might go into this expecting a revenge flick laden with righteous fury à la Black 47 but Arracht is a more considered piece of work. The vast majority of the story takes place in the aftermath of violence. Colmán's on the run now, he has been for two years. Life as he knew it is gone. His pillow is a rock and his shelter is the damp cave where he used to brew his poitín. At night he's lulled to sleep by the lapping of waves and then haunted by that faithful night and what happened since. It's tough going and it's longueurs may have you wondering whether the film has lost it's way already.

But then one day on secretive trip back to the mainland for fuel he comes across a sick young child called Kitty (Saise Ní Chuinn) and his life takes a sidestep and so does the story. It slowly turns from darkness to light as these two lost souls come to depend on each other, growing to like each other. In him she sees survival and in her he sees redemption. Starvation is ever present so skills Bear Grylls would baulk at are needed to stay alive and the story swerves again into a survival story, becoming paean to the strength of human resilence, of our resilience. But in Ireland of the 1840's hunger wasn't the only spectre stalking the land. The Brits were too. They were always it sure.

To director Tom Sullivan's credit though, he never makes them into a pantomime boogeyman, well mostly. The Lieutenant landlord (Michael McElhatton) isn't one of the absentee landlords we were all taught about, he knows his tenants names and situations, even their hobbies but like the landed gentry tended to be he was clueless about their suffering. He skillfully plays a complex part that adds a layer of ambiguity to what happens in the house that night. Peter Coonan's turn as a British land agent looking for Colman near the end though, that's the broad brit villain we all know, and with him comes an ending that verges on silliness but thankfully he appears too late in the day to really rock the boat much.

Arracht is in cinemas now. It's a powerful story of anger, regret and redemption lead by a towering turn from a commited Dónall Ó Héalaí. Don't let the subtitles or the language scare you away. It's a deeply Irish story but a universal tale.