Wild­fire

Out of the blue, Kel­ly (Nika McGuigan) returns home to her sis­ter Lau­ren (Nora-Jane Noone) after years of estrange­ment. Set on the fraught bor­der between Ire­land and North­ern Ire­land, Cathy Brady’s Wild­fire oper­ates in an atmos­phere of deep repres­sion and depicts the emo­tion­al fall­out of this sud­den reappearance.

When the pre­sumed-miss­ing Kel­ly (Nika McGuigan) arrives on the doorstep of her big sis­ter Lau­ren (Nora-Jane Noone), house and hus­band are wel­com­ing, but an invis­i­ble atmos­phere of repres­sion is intro­duced, and it chips away at Lauren’s façade of nor­mal­i­ty. The lost time is nev­er explained, only indi­cat­ed through Kelly’s assort­ment of pre­cious belong­ings, which includes a neck­lace that once belonged to her moth­er. This sen­ti­men­tal attach­ment spells chaos for Lau­ren who, old enough to remem­ber but young enough to feel con­fused by the sit­u­a­tion, shields her­self from the painful remem­brance of their mother’s death.

Kel­ly is an enig­ma, the kind of com­pli­cat­ed female pro­tag­o­nist you’d expect a trou­bled Jacque­line Wil­son char­ac­ter to grow up into, with only her big sis­ter pro­tect­ing her from the judge­ment of the world and the worst sides of her­self. Her phas­es of mania – of rage and joy – are unique­ly cap­tured by McGuigan, whose tor­na­do-of-a-per­for­mance pulls Noone in to pro­duce a per­fect storm at the heart of this imper­fect film. Their scenes togeth­er are mag­nif­i­cent, with every feel­ing used to ampli­fy their dynam­ic. But the vagaries, how­ev­er inten­tion­al, of Brady’s sto­ry­telling loosen this anchor.

The film opens on real footage of the Trou­bles, as Brady trans­lates the ​“patho­log­i­cal secre­cy” of a com­mu­ni­ty forcibly for­get­ting this trau­ma, mir­ror­ing it with the deeply per­son­al sto­ry of the sis­ters los­ing their moth­er. The dis­con­nect makes sense as it depicts a spe­cif­ic gen­er­a­tion left with a litany of men­tal health issues. Yet in mak­ing the sto­ry about both, the sharp edge of the per­son­al and polit­i­cal are lost. When we see Lau­ren and Kel­ly run through the streets and eat Flakes in front of ​“UNIT­ED IRE­LAND NOW” graf­fi­ti, it only empha­sis­es how much the his­to­ry feels like a back­drop and not quite fold­ed into the narrative.

Still, the act­ing at the heart of Wild­fire lives up to its name, and the painful loss of Nika McGuigan, who died from a can­cer-relat­ed ill­ness in 2019 at the age of 33, is keen­ly felt. Alas, in 85 min­utes, Cathy Brady doesn’t quite plough deep enough into the par­al­lels of psy­chosis and per­va­sive polit­i­cal strife, despite her care­ful direc­tion and the bril­liant exe­cu­tion of the var­i­ous, heart-wrench­ing back-and-forths. It is hard to come away with a clear impres­sion of the strug­gles of the coun­try or the characters.

Wild­fire is released in cin­e­mas on 3 Sep­tem­ber via Mod­ern Films.