No Stone Unturned

Hav­ing lost to them four years pre­vi­ous, Ire­land beat Italy in the 1994 World Cup. The vic­to­ry was set to make the front page the next morn­ing. And it would have, except six civil­ians were killed at the Heights Bar, a small pub in North­ern Ire­land, min­utes after the win­ning goal hit the back of the net. The Lough­in­is­land Mas­sacre, as it became known, still haunts the town, and film­mak­er Alex Gib­ney is clear­ly fas­ci­nat­ed with its enig­mat­ic nature as he has made it the sub­ject of inves­tiga­tive doc­u­men­tary, No Stone Unturned.

The film reopens the unsolved case, recon­nect­ing with a num­ber of fam­i­lies who have been left the dark for decades regard­ing who to blame for this tragedy. The mur­ders them­selves also extend a glimpse into the Trou­bles, the gru­elling civ­il war that saw Protes­tants and Catholics at log­ger­heads in North­ern Ire­land for 30 years.

Here, the par­tic­u­lars of the case are exam­ined, but noth­ing is solved and no major rev­e­la­tions reached. Gib­ney sheds light on the dark­er cor­ners of a what he finds to be a very shady inves­ti­ga­tion, but there is no real pay­off. ​“Col­lu­sion” is a term that crops up again and again, as the rela­tion­ship between loy­al­ist gun­men and the police forces inves­ti­gat­ing them becomes increas­ing­ly dubi­ous. Gib­ney explores the all-too-com­mon phe­nom­e­non in which guilty assailants go free because of shifty alle­giances on all sides, and it makes for a fas­ci­nat­ing if frus­trat­ing spectacle.

This makes sense; the process offers a taste of what the labo­ri­ous inves­ti­ga­tion must have felt like. But the doc­u­men­tary fails to deliv­er sat­is­fy­ing answers. It’s a lit­tle like a game of Clue­do – the cards are all laid out, we find out who did it, in which room and using what weapon. But the answers feel cheap and almost too com­part­men­talised, as if the per­son who won didn’t tell you they actu­al­ly looked at the answers on their sec­ond go.

From the out­set, this looks to be a dan­ger­ous­ly grip­ping David Finch­er-esque study into the elu­sive nature of truth, but it then plays out as an incom­plete true crime binge watch. Its ten­ta­tive han­dling of the facts leads to a sober­ing sense of sad­ness, sug­gest­ing a far big­ger prob­lem remains unsolved. While it expos­es the roots of a pos­si­ble con­spir­a­cy, you can’t help but feel that this film only scratch­es the sur­face of some­thing far more sinister.