Flicks, Maria Walls
Meet Mary: fresh from the slammer (post a short stay for a truculent nightclub attack on another female). Mad? Less crazy, more irate, Mary is defiant, candid, questioning - and increasingly typecast in her small-minded hometown of Drogheda (one of Dublin’s oldest villages). Shot in warm cinematic hues, this setting is initially homely and appealing. But the atmosphere is quickly turned up too high, pushing it into hotly uncomfortable territory. In Drogheda everyone knows your business. The parochial pressure of sameness and the cruelty dealt by an expectation of so-called normality overbears and constricts: it’s sincerely mean-spirited.
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