Katy Hayes
Politics is absent from dark but compelling Northern Irish murder tale
The Dig
15/15A, 97 mins
★★★★
Irish cinema seemed for so long to be obsessed with the national question; now, film-makers are neatly sidestepping it. This debut feature from co-directors and brothers Andy and Ryan Tohill is about a grieving father searching a bog for the remains of his murdered daughter.
Anyone familiar with the political narrative of Northern Ireland will see echoes of the plight of the families of the disappeared, the victims of the Troubles who were abducted and shot by the IRA and whose remains were never found. However, the film doesn’t mention politics, national questions or paramilitaries, and it doesn’t bring up any of the bad old stuff. It is part of the trend of post-political Irish film. Take the gun out of politics, and out of cinema, too.
Lance Daly’s Black ’47 from last year was about the Famine, but it was mainly a revenge western, adhering carefully to that genre’s characteristics. Similarly, The Dig is about a confrontation between a distraught father and the man who killed his daughter, and it’s more focused on tropes than Troubles.
In rural Northern Ireland, Ronan Callahan (Moe Dunford) emerges after 15 years in jail for the murder of Niamh McKenna. Her father, Sean (Lorcan Cranitch), has spent those 15 years doing the equivalent of hard labour on Callahan’s boggy land, trying to find his daughter’s remains.
The land is studded with flags marking the areas he has checked. His daughter Roberta (Emily Taaffe) tries attempts to dissuade him from this fruitless pursuit.
Callahan cannot remember anything about the night of Niamh’s death because he was blacked out on booze, but her skin was under his fingernails. He helps with the dig as a form of atonement, and a co-dependent bond forms with Sean.
A taut script by Stuart Drennan gives the actors plenty to play with. Cranitch is all deranged, grief-stricken anger and Dunford has something of a whipped dog about him. The story delivers enough twists and dramatic turns to remain compelling, and the psychology is subtle. Cinematographer Angus Mitchell creates a landscape of cold, unforgiving beauty in his desolate, expansive bog.
The Tohill brothers and their team are part of a new generation of film-makers who refuse to be prisoners of the past. They do not concern themselves with digging over old ground and reviving cinematic corpses that do not belong to their generation. It is as though this Northern Irish story has been put through an anti-political thought machine, and any whiff of politics erased.
The vision, though apolitical, is grim all the same. Nobody is having a laugh here. While the film-makers may have chosen to bypass the political conflict, its fallout might well have seeped into their bones.