God’s Creatures: Emily Watson Anchors Sublime Story about Small-town Secrets and Lives
By Karen Gordon
Rating: B+
Anchored by a superb performance by Emily Watson, God’s Creatures is a small, quiet film that packs a surprising punch. It’s not easy to categorize. It’s a family saga and a morality story, but goes deeper to talk about legacy, about reconciling a broader history as a mother is forced to look at what she believes.
Watson stars as Aileen O’Hara, a manager at a fish plant in a small tight-knit Irish coastal community. Fishing, in particular oyster fishing, is the main industry here. It seems that everyone in this small town is somehow related to it through family or work.
Aileen is shocked but delighted when, during a wake at the local pub, her son Brian (Paul Mescal) unexpectedly shows up. Brian’s been away in Australia for seven years, and we gather where and what he was doing there are mysterious and will stay that way. Has the prodigal son returned? For Aileen, her family is back together. For the other family members, including his distant father Con (Declan Conlon), it’s clear that not everyone is happy to see him again.
With Aileen’s blessing, Brian moves back into the family home and takes over the oyster business, once owned by his grandfather. It’s going to be awhile before that becomes profitable, but Brian — with the help of his devoted mother and distant father — starts to do the maintenance to put things back together.
In the meantime, Brian dives back into life in the small town. But things get funky quickly. Sarah (Aisling Franciosi), a young local woman and a family friend since childhood — who also works with Aileen at the fish plant — accuses Brian of rape. When the police ask Aileen about his whereabouts on the night of, she provides him with an alibi.
That moment, you’d imagine, must be an inner earthquake for Aileen, but the film stays the course. There’s no change in tone or approach. Aileen doesn’t become a detective or have a melt down. Instead, what we get is Aileen, driving back home to the usual routine, but from here on, looking out at the world with this accusation bouncing around in her psyche.
The idea for God’s Creatures came from Irish producer Fodhla Cronin O’Reilly, who co-developed the story with screenwriter Shane Crowley, based on life in small Irish villages and the kinds of cultures and traditions that they engender. O’Reilly hired the American directing team of Saela Davis and Anne Rose Holmer to bring it to life.
The film is so full of atmosphere and feels so much of Ireland, that you’d never guess the directors lived anywhere else. Davis and Holmer have given the film a fierce sense of time and place, of the coastal town in its wild, rugged beauty, and its sense of community… and its isolation.
They’ve given their film a sense of intimacy, keeping the camera close in on its characters, which makes the film feel lived in, but also underlines a sense of claustrophobia. The people who live here belong here, but also belong to a culture that they move in and adhere to without noticing the places where it has its darkness.
The script is likewise closed-in, intimate and spare. For better and for worse, the film doesn’t go into deep explanations. There aren’t a lot of speeches connecting the dots for us, or for the characters. Instead, the filmmakers rely on their superb cast making time for us to watch them, at times just react.
Watson holds down the centre of this movie with a remarkably contained performance. Aileen shows very little outward change as she reconciles not just who her son might be but who she is as well. Mescal gives us a character who has enough charm to interest us, but also projects something that’s just evasive enough to keep us slightly unsettled from the moment he arrives in the village.
God’s Creatures is not a polemic. It’s a film that winds us in but leaves us with much to contemplate about the world around us. It is an interesting companion piece to Toronto filmmaker Sarah Polley’s Women Talking, which is due to be released in December.
In very different ways, both movies ask us to look at the way some cultural values have become entangled with the notion of accepted tradition. How those continue to cause women to suffer. And how each one of us has places where we might be perhaps unintentionally blind to our part in holding on to some ideas because we worry about what untangling them might just mean.
God Creatures. Directed by Saela David and Anne Rose Holmer, screenplay by Shane Crowley. Starring Emily Watson, Paul Mescal and Aisling Franciosi. Opens in select theatres and on demand September 30.