What happens when the one thing that gives your life meaning is snatched away from you? Robert Higgins and Patrick McGivney‘s intimate character study deals with this question as a young man’s sporting ambitions are wrecked by serious injury. Anchored by a mercurial turn by Éanna Hardwicke, Lakelands examines small-town masculinity, as well as the contemporary topic of the legacy of head trauma in sport. It’s a confident, compelling debut feature.
Cian (Hardwicke) thinks he is content with his lot. He works hard on his father’s (Lorcan Cranitch) farm. In his spare time he’s the captain of the local Gaelic football team. It’s fair to say it’s his entire life. Beside the training and the matches, most of his friends are in the team, and his position as captain makes him a big fish in the small pond of his village. After a night out in Cavan finishes with three locals kicking the tar out of him, he’s soon back on his feet. He brushes the persistent headaches and shifts in vision off as a concussion, but when a doctor tell him his playing days are over his world crumbles and he enters a self-destructive spiral.
A protagonist like Cian poses a tricky proposition which is dealt with admirably. It would be easy to to lose engagement given his unerring talent for making the wrong decision. From allowing himself to being strongarmed into a post-training pint which becomes a fateful night out, to putting his body on the line again as he channels his rage into a scrap with some mouthy youngsters, everything he does could drive the empathy from a Samaritan. Full credit to Higgins and Givney, and the talented Hardwicke, that the worth and the vulnerability of Cian also comes through. He’s deeply flawed, but in no way a bad person. And it’s fully established that he acts how he’s grown up believing a man should act. The village isn’t a hotbed of toxic masculinity exactly, but the traditional patriarchal values that foreground stoicism, athletic prowess, and a bellowing drinking culture are deeply rooted. When the narrow scope of Cian’s world has been all of a sudden squeezed down to a crushing fixed point, expecting him to force down all that emotion and cork it like a volcanic plug isn’t going to cut it.
Offering a sympathetic foil to Cian outside of family and teammates is old friend (and, it’s implied, old flame) Grace, played with vivacity and intelligence by Danielle Galligan. From her Cian gets both a feminine and an outsider’s perspective. Returning home to visit her father who has drank himself to the point of death, she represents a more worldly ambition, and a broader lived experience. Of course, she can see beneath the brash young man to the terrified boy underneath, and of course her father represents one potential future for Cian. And it’s one that seems like it could be a distinct possibility. This risks making Grace little more than a walking metaphor, but Galligan offers a fully-rounded performance and she shares a real chemistry with Hardwicke; one that flirts around attraction, but in which time and distance leave a certain guarded wariness.
It’s the performances of Hardwicke and Galligan that will gain the plaudits, but much praise should be be given to its co-directors, who have unobtrusively crafted a simple story told very well. It’s not flashy in style or didactic in tone. Any lulls in narrative drive are easily nullified by some nice moments of character, through which a lot of necessary background and history is implied rather than stated. Ireland seems to producing any number of artful, slow-burning dramas that foreground character and thematic depth. Films like The Quiet Girl, Rosie, and My Sailor, My Love are all richly rewarding viewing. Even horror films like Mandrake and You Are Not My Mother favour this approach. Lakelands is another fine addition to this company. One hopes that films like this that do so well on the festival circuit get the chance to reach the wider audience they deserve.
Screening as part of Glasgow Film Festival on Sat 4 Mar 2023 at GFT 2 and Sun 5 Mar 2023 at GFT 3