Below the film’s mournful top layer, there lurks a simmering, suppressed violence. Yet the Tohills’ antagonists aren’t building but excavating, dragging themselves towards early or shallow graves the idea of a long-buried past resurfacing in the Irish present carries a renewed resonance. Why his quest agitates the prodigal farmhand is but gradually revealed yet with admirable economy the Tohills and screenwriter Stuart Drennan establish a stand-off between men in small, dark holes who have sublimated all feeling into obsessive, possibly futile activity.Ĭertain shots framing these worker ants against the horizon reminded this viewer of Philip Haas’s underseen film of Paul Auster’s The Music of Chance, which set two disparate drifters to assembling a stone wall on an eccentric recluse’s estate. An obstacle to the quiet life soon emerges, in the form of a crumpled older man, Sean (Lorcan Cranitch), observed digging up the adjoining peat bog.

In the prologue’s teachable example of show-don’t-tell film-making, rough-hewn, edgy Ronan (Moe Dunford) returns to the boarded-up farmhouse he once called home with an apparent eye to starting afresh.

T wins Ryan and Andy Tohill’s distinctive homecoming parable, further proof of Irish cinema’s resurgent boldness and versatility, finds a striking visual metaphor for the emotional labours required to find peace of mind nowadays.

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