Liam O Mochain has been bravely getting solid, entertaining features into cinemas since before the Irish film industry’s current renaissance had reached even embryonic visibility.
In recent years he has happened upon the anthology as a way of telling a spectrum of related stories. The writer-director here follows up Lost & Found, his 2017 collection set around a railway station, with a bundle concerning homes and homelessness.
The best episodes have an unpretentious warmth that jollies you happily to welcome destinations. If you don’t care for one, another will be along in a moment.
There is a sense of repertory theatre about it all. Actors appear in more than one episode – including the director, with various beards and haircuts – but each is its own discrete yarn.
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O Mochain and his team have wisely held back release until the perfect time for a flick that has a bit to do with the Yuletide. The most heart-warming of the stories has a group of homeless people making a Christmas for themselves in an empty restaurant.
The story is obviously alert to the tragedies of being unhoused, but, as Christmas stories should, it remains open to reassuring sentimentality. The script gets that sometimes those problems – grief, loneliness – are connected to those aired around seasonal tables in even the most lavish houses.
Another story dares to defy preposterous taboos about exploring the sex lives of older couples. Elsewhere we meet a woman facing up to an encounter with the son she has never met. The most unlikely chapter maybe overreaches with a tale of a monstrous high-tech oven that looks to have escaped from an episode of Charlie Brooker’s Black Mirror.
“I wanted to make a film about home and what it means to different people,” O Mochain, whose family was homeless for the first year and half of his life, has said, and the film cannot be faulted for variety or sincerity.
The tight budget does show through here and there, but experienced actors such as Brendan Conroy, Mary Murray and Marion O’Dwyer keep it aloft. There is a sense of an ongoing conversation between each of the narratively distinct – but thematically overlapping – stories in a humane film that makes the best of limited resources.
In cinemas from Friday, November 7th
