REDEMPTION OF A ROGUE
After 7 years of exile, Jimmy Cullen decides to head back to his native village. A return of the prodigal son it is not, seeing as the whole village hates his guts after a lost football match. His luck isn’t better with his brother’s, who welcomes him with a firm head butt. Same for his ex, with whom he broke up after he left her paralyzed in a wheelchair. But all he wants to do is make peace with his closest friends and to tell his father with a penchant for the bottle and the belt to bugger off into eternity, before electrocuting himself with a toaster. Except, daddy buggers off a little bit too soon all on his own and leaves one last wish in his testament: to not be put six feet under on a rainy day. That might seem like a formality in Punta Cana but, here, in Ireland and its 250 rainy days a year… And of course, that’s when it starts raining. No, pouring. For days on end. Until turning into a full-fledged flood, complete with all the biblical plagues in the Christian manual… Philip Dorherty’s debut feature lands smack in the middle between the Coen bros and some sort of eschatological study of depression (there there, a learned word from time to time doesn’t hurt), both deeply sad and hilarious; if you dig grim sarcasm, that is! Catholicism’s shadow looms large here, but is also ridiculed with an antihero who could just as well be Jesus lost in Bukowski’s universe.