God’s Crea­tures

A black sheep boy returns to the fam­i­ly nest and caus­es all man­ner of emo­tion­al bal­ly­hoo in Saela Davis and Anna Rose Holmer’s atmos­pher­ic psy­chodra­ma, God’s Crea­tures, the wel­come if low-key fol­low-up to Homer’s feisty 2015 debut, The Fits. Said son, Bri­an, is played by man-of-the-moment and 2023 award sea­son dar­ling, Paul Mescal, who slinks into the role of a dirty-rot­ten oys­ter farmer with a side­line in ille­gal salmon poach­ing, among oth­er nefar­i­ous bits involv­ing local song­bird Sarah, played by Ais­ling Fran­ciosi. While we’ve seen that Mescal can do impec­ca­ble sad­boi in After­sun, here the sheen of good cheer comes with an under­tow of inde­pen­dence and violence.

The film sees him expert­ly play on the dot­ing affec­tions of his saint­ly, com­mu­ni­ty-mind­ed moth­er, Aileen, who is beau­ti­ful­ly realised by the always-great Emi­ly Wat­son. What ini­tial­ly plays out as a grim social real­ist por­trait of hard­scrab­ble lives in a tra­di­tion­al Irish fish­ing vil­lage, soon segues into a dis­turb­ing fem­i­nist thriller with a hint of the Mil­dred Pierce about it, con­cern­ing as it does the lim­its of mater­nal pro­tec­tion and the ignored abus­es of awful men.

There is some­thing a lit­tle boil­er­plate in how the film is struc­tured which pre­vents it from offer­ing any­thing par­tic­u­lar­ly orig­i­nal. Were the visu­als not so gor­geous, you might even see this as mate­r­i­al primed for the small rather than big screen. Nar­ra­tive-wise, it’s what you might call ​“over tight”, in that there is no detail for detail’s sake, and it quick­ly becomes a game of guess the fore­shad­ow­ing device. All the inter­lock­ing plot frag­ments are so per­fect­ly aligned that the film ends up being sti­fling, and it also goes too far out of its way to answer all the ques­tions it pos­es about the moral­i­ty of the sit­u­a­tion. So not one to pon­der for very long once the cred­its have rolled.

Still, the cast ful­ly com­mit to their meaty roles, and the dark ener­gy between Mescal and Wat­son keeps things bob­bing above the tide nice­ly. What does nudge this above sim­i­lar­ly-inclined social-real­ist thrillers is Chayse Irvin’s atmos­pher­ic cin­e­matog­ra­phy, whose omi­nous blue-green vis­tas clev­er­ly imbues the mate­r­i­al with goth­ic ghost sto­ry trap­pings. Indeed, the film opens on a young fish­er­man falling to his per­il – appar­ent­ly they don’t learn to swim as a deter­rent for jump­ing out of the boat – and his spec­tral pres­ence returns to claim var­i­ous oth­er souls.

The sound design, too, is used to sharp effect, as Aileen is con­stant­ly tor­ment­ed by the pelt of dri­ving rain, or the con­tin­u­al loud clack­ing of oys­ter shells drop­ping off a con­vey­or-belt. These sud­den bursts of noise – which include a non-diegetic Irish drum sound that only Aileen seems to hear – are all the more effec­tive for being in such an oth­er­wise hushed film.

Char­ac­ters talk in whis­pered tones, that is until they’re yelling at one anoth­er on the beer-soaked floor of the local dive bar. It’s a neat lit­tle manœu­vre that’s exe­cut­ed with admirable skill, but as with the tem­plat­ed plot­ting, it also comes across as the robust deploy­ment of a tried-and-test­ed ​“move” rather than some­thing new and exciting.

Lit­tle White Lies is com­mit­ted to cham­pi­oning great movies and the tal­ent­ed peo­ple who make them.

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