Inheritance drama a testament to family bonds
With Horseshoe, writer-director Adam O’Keeffe and co-director Edwin Mullane make their first feature as a team, and the result is an off-kilter Irish family comedy-drama that shows remarkable confidence for a debut.
The drama hinges on the last will and testament of a monstrous and complex Irish father, fit to follow in the footsteps of John McGahern’s Michael Moran in Amongst Women.
Colm Canavan, played by a spittle-stained Lalor Roddy, emotionally controls his four estranged adult offspring from beyond the grave.
Horseshoe examines how oppressive relationships have led to varied and destructive coping methods.
Set in the west of Ireland, greed for land is also a silent player in this drama.
Though O’Keeffe and co-director Edwin Mullane have worked independently on shorts, this is their first collaboration under their WaveWalker Films banner.
It feels like the product of far more seasoned film-makers, and is particularly alive to the peculiar rhythms of a family still living under the iron will of a deceased patriarch, who appears in ghostly interludes to hector and bully, in death as in life.
These spectral conversations are less horror than psychological reckoning – moments in which long-suppressed resentments and secrets nudge their way to the surface.
The film surprises in how shifting allegiances and emotional revelations emerge among the siblings.
The father’s shadow falls longest on eldest son Jer (Jed Murray) who has inherited both his demeanour and love of the home place, but also a locked-in detachment from his emotions.
But as the drama unfolds, each of the four grown children learns novel things about their siblings, a clever structural device that keeps the narrative gently unfurling.
Jer has never left the crumbling family home which he shares with youngest brother Evan (Eric O’Brien), a sweet-natured people-pleaser whose life as a gay man is a cause of some local tension.
Middle siblings Niall (Neill Fleming) and Cass (Carolyn Bracken) have lives elsewhere which have now come under strain, echoing the unresolved turmoil at home.
Cass and Niall emerge as the most fully developed characters, the script giving them enough room to reveal the ways they’ve tried to outrun their past.
The catalyst for the family’s reluctant reunion is the arrival of a probate lawyer (John Connors) with a blunt ultimatum that is also an effective dramatic device: the siblings have 24 hours to unanimously agree on what to do with the house and land or they will lose the property.
Neat frame
This ticking clock creates a neat narrative frame and a beautifully played walk between the four siblings to the ‘Horseshoe’ of the title, allows the film’s emotional clarity to shine.
The supporting cast is populated by exactly the sort of eccentrics one expects from a rural Ireland ensemble, with an acid trip at a yoga retreat adding a dash of new-age earnestness, as well as a heart-of-gold local publican.
Jass Foley’s cinematography captures the rugged beauty of the West and conveys both its comfort and claustrophobia.
Though the drama touches on heavy concepts, Horseshoe avoids becoming heavy-handed.
Themes of abuse and violence, and the difficulty of forgiveness, are handled with care, and always with a sharp ear for sibling banter.
Horseshoe opens in cinemas today.