Lalor Roddy has emerged as Irish cinema’s MVP in recent years, grafting a contemplative gravitas to Frank Berry’s Michael, Inside and Pat Collins’ That They May Face the Rising Sun. It feels appropriate that this gifted actor haunts his co-stars in this impressive debut feature from Edwin Mullane and Adam O’Keeffe.
Lalor stamps Colm Canavan, the late abusive patriarch of four warring Sligo siblings, with a bracing cocktail of ferocity and spent sorrow.
The combustible set-up is familiar: a traumatised family, a contested inheritance and a house rattling with difficult history. But Horseshoe reinvents this dog-eared premise with dark humour and a keen understanding of the emotional complexities underpinning huge family rows.
Jer (Jed Murray) and Evan (Eric O’Brien) have never left the outsize rural home that Colm ruled with an iron fist. They are a study in arrested development. The boyish Evan continues to chase GAA glory; Jer has unresolved issues with a local bartender (Mary Murray).
Meanwhile, Cass (Carolyn Bracken) and Niall (Neill Fleming) escaped only to sleepwalk into the familial discord they tried to flee. Cass is close to losing her house; Niall, a yoga practitioner, is being drained financially and psychologically by a custody battle.
Tension surges as soon as they’re all in the same room – and only escalates when a solicitor (John Connors, with a twinkle in his eye) announces they have 24 hours to unanimously decide how to settle the estate or risk everything going to the State.
The returnees are desperate to sell the house; the remainers will do anything to keep their home. Old alliances and grudges swiftly resurface.
O’Keeffe’s well-observed script sketches a family who communicate through barbs, sullen silences and unwanted cups of tea. There are violent clashes between Jer and Niall and infantilised retreats. Cass, regressing to childhood protections, cowers under a table as her brothers brawl.
Mullane and O’Keeffe wrote most roles with the cast in mind, and the tailored familiarity pays off: the skilled ensemble is note-perfect even when later subplots get a little muddled.
The film’s locations, notably the characterful, lonely house on the Sligo-Donegal border, are framed with grey, rough-hewn beauty by the cinematographer Jass Foley. Anna Mullarkey’s score deftly marries folk fixtures with minimalist motifs to amplify the rising discord.
Horseshoe was a deserving winner of the award for best Irish first feature at Galway Film Fleadh and a fine opening gambit for the film-making duo.
