Q&A/Review The Righteous: Republic of Doyle's Mark O'Brien's stark, gothic supernatural directorial debut
By Jim Slotek
Years before Canadians got to know him as Des, the apprentice detective on the Newfoundland-based series Republic of Doyle, Mark O’Brien wanted to direct.
“I directed an episode,” says the St. John’s-born director and co-star of the gothic supernatural thriller The Righteous. “And I’ve been directing a lot of shorts for years with my own money and putting them on credit cards, renting cameras from audio-visual houses, using friends’ parents’ cam-corders.
“I mean, you learn a lot just being on a set as an actor. But making those short films and directing on Doyle helped a lot.”
Being successful at acting tended to put the feature directing dream on hold. Post-Doyle, he had roles in movies like Marriage Story, Arrival, the TV series City on a Hill, current roles in AMC’s 61st Street and HBO’s Perry Mason, and the horror comedy Ready or Not.
But becoming friends on the set of Ready or Not with fellow Canadian Henry Czerny, helped him put a major piece of his first-feature puzzle together.
In the starkly black-and-white The Righteous, Czerny is an ex-priest, now married. He and his wife Ethel (Mimi Kuzyk) are suffering the recent traffic death of their young daughter when an apparently injured young man named Aaron (O’Brien) shows up on their front lawn and begins insinuating himself into their lives.
Aaron is evasive, there’s an element of the diabolical about him and the word-twisting debates he has with the de-frocked priest. He has an agenda, and, well, let’s just say souls are involved.
ORIGINAL-CIN: I understand you got to be friends with Henry Czerny on Ready or Not. Nice get, especially since he famously played a priest early in his career (in the Mount Cashel Orphanage abuse drama The Boys of St. Vincent).
MARK O’BRIEN: “I wasn’t writing it with him in mind. It kind of came on later. I saw him in L.A. at the premiere for Ready or Not, and I thought, “Y’know, he’d be great for this.”
I was picturing someone else, like a different type. But then I thought, he’s a great actor, he’ll mold it into something else, That’s more interesting. I like acting that evolves and changes and moves.
And I’ve got to say, I was a little tickled by the Boys of St. Vincent connection. It was a seminal film for a lot of people, particularly Newfoundlanders. I like the meta aspect of, years later, he’s back playing a priest wanting to atone for something he’d done. In a weird subversive way, I got some sort of joy out of. It was a topping on the cake.
Mark O’Brien
O/C: It was very smart of you, director Mark O’Brien, casting actor Mark O’Brien as Aaron. He gave a really unsettling performance.
O’BRIEN: (Laughs). Thank you. I never wrote it with myself in mind. I was writing a movie that was speaking to me and I enjoyed it. I really became enamored of this gothic, psychological world.
“And as I kept writing it, I realized, as an actor, there’s certain things you see you might be good for. You have an understanding of why you got one part and didn’t get another. I just thought, “What I have to offer would be good in this thing.”
By the time I was halfway through writing it, I knew I was going to do it.
O/C: Catholicism seems to be ripe for supernatural horror. Were you raised Catholic?
O’BRIEN: I was never really a practicing Catholic, the community I grew up in was Catholic I suppose. But I thought it was just a great backdrop for high stakes and the damnation of your soul.
“If you believe in something like God, it makes the stakes in the story much stronger. Suffering for eternity is about as big as it can all get.
And I like stories about God and the Devil, it just appealed to me because it’s such a grand operatic, using that backdrop as a character’s conundrum.
O/C: As an actor, you’ve had a lot of stand-out performances in small roles. Do people come up to you and ask, “Where do I know you from?”
O’BRIEN: (Laughs) I’ll tell you something, every actor gets asked, ‘Where do I know you from?” And if they thought about that question for three seconds, they’d know it’s unanswerable. I don’t know the filmography of what people have watched, so I can’t tell them what they’ve seen.
In Canada, yeah, it’s Doyle still. In the States, it’s things like City on a Hill or Ready or Not. I get noticed a lot in the States. Which says that people watch a lot of TV, I suppose.
O/C: Or movies on TV.
O’BRIEN: Very true. I’m so excited that we’re in theatres in Canada, because I’m a theatre hound. But if it wasn’t for streaming, a lot of these films wouldn’t be seen at all.
You don’t make a movie specifically for people to sit in the theatre. My God, it if happens, it’s like winning the lottery. But if they watch it at home, it’s not like you didn’t make the movie.
REVIEW: THE RIGHTEOUS
By Jim Slotek
Rating: B-plus
Almost a palate cleanser in an era of blinding effects and empty scripting, Mark O’Brien’s The Righteous is dark, stark and simple – a claustrophobically intimate supernatural thriller that rides entirely on a smart script and acting that lives up to it.
Shot in harsh black-and-white – a perfect cinematography choice for a movie about good and evil and atonement – it’s an unsettling movie that could be characterized as a proxy debate between God and the Devil.
The movie begins on the ultimate sad note, with ex-priest Frederick (Henry Czerny) and his wife Ethel (Mimi Kuzyk) in a paralyzed state following the death of their daughter, as concerned friends surround them with awkward and inappropriate words of “comfort.” (A fellow priest even suggests the death is God’s way of calling him back to the Church).
Amid their sleepwalk of grief, an injured young man named Aaron (O’Brien) literally lands at their front door, asking for shelter. His memory is shaky and his answers evasive. The logical thing to do would have been to call an ambulance. But that would make for a short movie.
Instead, Aaron insinuates himself into Frederick and Ethel’s life, giving her a surrogate child to dote on, and zeroing in on him with conversations that tweak his past and his conscience. The full story unfolds as their dialectic goes on, with scary strings on the soundtrack amplifying the stakes.
Czerny’s agonized face, often in close-up, is the soul of the movie. Where O’Brien’s Aaron brings straight menace and fake solicitousness, Frederick communicates soul-deep suffering. The past haunts us, and his haunts him movingly and profoundly.
The Righteous. Written and directed by Mark O’Brien. Starring Henry Czerny, Mark O’Brien and Mimi Kuzyk. Opens in selected theatres starting Friday, June 3. Available on VOD June 24.