Cannes Review: Emily Watson & Paul Mescal In ‘God’s Creatures’
19.05.2022 - 11:55
/ deadline.com
Early in Saela Davis and Anna Rose Holmer’s dark and stately God’s Creatures, screening in Directors’ Fortnight here at Cannes, one of the younger women at a wake in an old Irish fishing village declares that her new baby will definitely be learning to swim. The dead man drowned, a professional risk on the surging waters of the west of Ireland. Even now that the fishing industry has given way to oyster beds suspended in chest-deep water, the farmers wear heavy waders and the worst can happen. The other women are startled. Swimming lessons? That’s not how things are done around here.
Like a gun pulled in a play’s first act, this bit of distaff chat is a clear indicator of where we’re headed; death hovers over every scene that follows, as persistent as the wind that whistles around the single glazing of the workers’ cottages. Fatalism is a habit of mind; what can you do? “We’re all God’s creatures in the dark,” says one woman morosely.
Two stellar performances anchor God’s Creatures, giving both body and soul to a story that could feel thinly predictable in lesser hands. Emily Watson, always extraordinary and never more so than here, plays Aileen O’Hara, stalwart wife, mother and supervisor of the sorting lines at the local shellfish packing plant; Paul Mescal plays her prodigal son. Like so many cinema mammies before her, Watson’s Aileen is a tower of strength physically and emotionally, just as competent working the oyster beds as she is fixing arguments over the kitchen table. Her husband Con (Declan Conlon) has settled into a disagreeable middle age, which shadows the joy she clearly feels when their son Brian suddenly returns from several years in Australia.
Mescal, familiar to fans of television’s Normal People,
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