Mammal – Film Review by Frank L.

Directed by Rebecca Daly
Writers: Rebecca Daly, Glenn Montgomery
Stars: Rachel Griffiths, Michael McElhatton, Barry Keoghan

Margaret (Rachel Griffiths) is divorced and works in a second-hand clothes shop in a run down Dublin suburb. She appears to have an ordered, humdrum, disciplined life which includes having a daily swim in the public pool. Her terraced house fulfils her needs and also permits her, with its spare bedroom, to have a paying guest. Water plays a prominent role in her life whether as a long slow under-the-surface daily plunge in the public pool, splashy showers seen through a translucent shower curtain in the bathroom, a spur of the moment skinny dip in a lake or an intimate encounter in the bath.

Margaret has a past which includes a divorced husband and their son Patrick. The present includes Joe (Barry Keogan), an adolescent who is on the verge of going-off-the-rails, to whom Margaret offers her spare bedroom because her lodger has moved out and he appears to be rootless. His social milieu are lads of his own age who have little purpose to their lives. Griffiths and Keogan create a relationship of tautness and ambiguity, developing an intensity which is unclassifiable. It is unsettling in that that Joe is not all that dissimilar in age to Margaret’s son Patrick whose precise whereabouts for much of the film is not certain. Her relationship to Patrick is a fine counterpoint to her relationship with Joe and intensifies the depths of unhappiness which smoulders in the fractured relationship which she retains with the divorced husband.

Rebecca Daly creates a great deal of tension by the use of fairly long sequences with little or no dialogue. Griffiths is the perfect actor for such sequences. Her presence generates an awkward authority. The lack of dialogue at times sharpens the eeriness which pervades. Griffiths’ calmness and unhurried movements increase the sense of unease. Joe’s youthful energy and incipient latent violence, which seems to lie just under his skin, intensifies further the strangeness of their relationship.

It is a film which engages at all times and is probably worth seeing more than once in order to understand better the layers of tension and dissonance which permeate the relationship between Margaret and Joe.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bHkmvBHCiH4