God’s Creatures: an evocative mood piece that loses its way

Death is a bookend in God’s Creatures. What opens this disquieting tale of troubling decisions in a hardscrabble, rain-weathered Irish coastal village is the death of a local oyster farmer who drowns as the fateful tide comes in. Another tragedy will go on to close the film, a mark of the dangerous cycles of life in this ghostly part of the world. In a morbid local tradition, the fishermen here never learn how to swim, so they’re never expected to save anyone else who may have the misfortune of succumbing to the water.

The one villager who does feel a need to save others – her own son in particular – is Aileen (Emily Watson), an employee at the village factory where the fishermen’s hauls are taken to be gutted, cleaned and prepared. Her days are routine and challenging – never enough money to be had, never enough work to offer others. At home, she swoons over her baby grandson and cares for her ailing brother-in-law Paddy (Lalor Roddy). When her son Brian (Paul Mescal) returns after a mysterious extended stay in Australia, a rupture begins to make itself felt. Aileen couldn’t be happier to see him, even as he brings with him his lingering resentment for his father and more of the machismo that pervades the place he once left behind.

When Aileen’s young colleague Sarah (Aisling Franciosi) misses a few shifts after a night in the town bar, a night Aileen knows Brian also spent in that bar, the ripples of her son’s return begin to be felt most forcefully. Soon, a policeman comes calling for Brian, who has been accused of rape. With Aileen’s subsequent lie – that her son was at home with her – comes Brian’s salvation and Sarah’s alienation.

The lack of clarity surrounding Brian’s past is an effective, if somewhat obvious, directorial decision that speaks to the way blind eyes are turned to past behaviours and incidents in this community; the collective attitude of misogyny allows men like Brian to be sheltered from accountability and women like Sarah to be destroyed. There is also the suggestion that Sarah and Brian had a relationship as teenagers years before, and hints of a legacy of abuse suffered, darkening an already gloomy picture.

Mescal combines his boyish charm with a stoicism that hardens his performance to effectively portray the brutality of masculinity to which Brian is accustomed, while Watson progressively softens, her lined face and loose hair an expression of exhaustion and emptiness. She is a woman who puts up little resistance to the laws of nature in this backwards place, unwaveringly devoted to the men in her life and dismissive of the women – such as Sarah or even her own daughter Erin (Toni O’Rourke) – who try to change her perspective. Shane Crowley’s script only really scratches the surface of the clash going on here between the old ways and the new, and of Aileen’s awakening to her complicity, but it’s still interesting territory.

Co-directors Saela Davis and Anna Rose Holmer (who previously worked together on Holmer’s 2015 directorial debut The Fits) are adept at building a deep sense of atmosphere and tension within a fairly traditional family-drama format. But what begins as a beguiling portrait of a struggling community, coloured by the coldness and coarseness of the environment’s textures, starts to drift as the story unfolds. Davis and Holmer’s narrative starts to lose its focus: is it Aileen’s motherly instincts at the heart of this story, Brian’s violence and ignorance, or Sarah’s recovery? Without a clear dramatic thrust, each strand of the plot weakens and character motivations become muddled. Crowley’s dialogue also tends towards the clunky in its symbolism, and the initially effective atmospherics grow overbearing at times, compounded by a repetitive score flush with harsh violins and choral voices. By the end, as Aileen seeks absolution for her own crimes, her final act lacks the emotional build-up needed for a more satisfying, or credible, payoff.

Watson and Mescal keep this downbeat small-town drama engaging, both falling into the same naturalistic groove to convincingly portray a mother and son devoted to one another before that harmony is fractured by the truth. The film’s well-sustained melancholy tone reinforces the misogyny and hopelessness of this place for those with no means of escaping it. It all makes God’s Creatures a competent and often interesting film, but one that would have benefited from more dynamism and narrative confidence.

► God’s Creatures is in UK cinemas from Friday.