Crowley’s script can lean heavily on literary monologuing, with ambiguous feelings not just suggested but comprehensively articulated. “God’s Creatures” largely avoids didactic moralizing in favor of a deeper, more sorrowful examination of interior guilt, accountability and compromised solidarity - though its touch in this regard could be lighter. Visited upon multiple characters, the mounting misfortune that ensues stems from the timely subject of society’s patriarchal tendency to disbelieve women, or to grant certain female archetypes more credibility than others. When a sexual assault charge is brought against Brian, these flinty tensions and question marks gain color and context, while further conflicts spiral from the situation when Aileen, in a fit of blind loyalty to her son, provides a false alibi for him.
Con and Erin are less openly welcoming, while others in the small, whispering community regard him askance - notably Aileen’s melancholic colleague Sarah (Franciosi), a former girlfriend of Brian’s, who keeps her distance where he’d rather resume relations. Aileen is sufficiently thrilled to have her golden boy back that she avoids asking too many probing questions. As rudely as he disappeared on them, he returns home one afternoon without warning or explanation, announcing his intention to revive Paddy’s defunct oyster farm. That would be prodigal son Brian (Mescal), who dropped out of the family for several years to work in Australia, remaining more or less incommunicado throughout his absence. Of Aileen’s two children, she’s the one who stayed close to home it also becomes clear she was never the favorite. She shares a boxy, dimly lit house with her chilly husband Con (Declan Conlon) and catatonic brother-in-law Paddy (Lalor Roddy), while relations with her adult daughter Erin (Toni O’Rourke), herself a new mom, somehow aren’t as warm as you might expect. Protecting her predominantly female staff with a near-maternal sense of duty, she’s good at a job that evidently brings her little joy, and home life isn’t much of a relief. The film, moving and emotionally intelligent, could use a touch more of their heady strangeness.Īny wildness, however, has long since left the life of Aileen O’Hara (Watson), a middle-aged team leader at the fish processing facility that gives her gray home village its faint economic pulse. (The filmmakers split directing and editing credits there, sharing one for writing here they’re billed as joint helmers.) Far from their home turf, they imbue “God’s Creatures” with a stately grace while tamping down their more experimental impulses, respectful to a fault of the words and world they’ve adopted.
That faintly theatrical quality is a less obvious match for the gifts of Davis and Holmer, who dazzled with the tactile sensuality and subjective reverie of their 2015 debut “The Fits,” a brief, intoxicating study of a Black preteen girl finding her place in a Cincinnati recreation center.