Christopher Andrews writes and directs a film about generational trauma, the baggage of toxic masculinity, what we do when we feel the weight of responsibility, or when we just make the wrong choices at every turn. Two shepherd families with petty rivalries find themselves on a collision course where every gesture escalates the situation. With Barry Keoghan and Christopher Abbott.
Christopher Abbott is Michael O’Shea, a young man who is introduced to us as having a violent streak and a difficult relationship with his father, Ray (Colm Meaney), and the family legacy, which involves an ancestral vocation for pastoralism. Barry Keoghan is Jack, the son of Gary (Paul Ready) and Caroline (Nora-Jane Noone), Michael’s ex-girlfriend. These two families see their paths intertwined by petty choices that will dictate everyone’s future. This is a generational portrait that struggles with the weight of tradition and the fragility of life in rural Ireland. Christopher Andrews doesn’t give us a black and white world, there are no good guys or bad guys, there are people broken by life and the choices they make to survive. The beauty of the landscape is the metaphorical ray of sunshine in the narrative and Abbott and Keoghan are masterful in the way they capture the violence and vulnerability, with a soupçon of tragicness, of their characters. (Ana Cabral Martins)
