Two worlds. In one of them a tinpot Don Corleone called Power (Aidan Gillen) presides over a ruthless drugs ring. In the other, shellshocked ex-Afghanistan soldier Danny (Luke McQuillan) makes a bid for shared custody of his son with his long-suffering wife Gill (Jade Jordan), aided by kind-hearted social worker Kate (Louise Bourke) after a careless accident renders him homeless.
Director Mark O’Connor (Cardboard Gangsters) coalesces both worlds in Amongst the Wolves (16), a film so real you feel at times you’re watching a documentary. Such is the manner in which horrific fiction has morphed into horrific fact in our sometime island of saints and scholars.
Ireland has been in the grip of the drug ‘culture’ (to use that ridiculous expression) for many moons now. A number of directors have tried to portray this with varying degrees of credibility. O’Connor knocks it out of the park with a visceral combination of heart, muscle and firepower.
I find it hard to recommend a film like this. It’s so violent it will turn many people’s stomachs in the way Quentin Tarantino’s ones do. But it demands to be seen. It demands to be seen because it illustrates how far we’ve descended towards an at times animalistic society where lives are casually dispensed with for thirty pieces of silver – or thirty bags of cocaine.
Gillen has been playing the bad guy for so long you feel some day he’ll be tempted to phone it in. Fear not. There’s always some twist with this brilliant actor to make the nefariousness new. Here it’s the veiled threats, the almost shy smile, the crushed velvet voice of a baby-faced killer.
I mentioned Don Corleone. When we first see Marlon Brando playing that character in The Godfather he isn’t drilling someone dead. He’s cradling a cat. The secret of doing villains is not to throw your weight around a la James Cagney. When things are played down it makes them even more ominous.
McQuillan, doubling up on co-writing duties with O’Connor, is excellent as the powder keg waiting to explode, an ‘angel of death’ reminiscent of Robert De Niro’s Travis Bickle from Taxi Driver as he tries to prise vulnerable teen Will (Daniel Fee) away from the straitjacket of ‘dealing’.
Will is mired in the crosshairs of Power’s mini-empire due to a family debt, the unfortunate legacy of his dead father, another tragic figure in O’Connor’s mosaic of dysfunctionality.
The only fault with the film is the sanitisation of its last five minutes. If Danny did to Power’s gang in real life what he does in the film he wouldn’t be where we see him here. He’d either be dead or in The Witness Protection Scheme.
O’Connor should have ended his Armageddon of horror a little earlier. He brings us so far into its spine-chilling underbelly we should have been left reeling there without the anodyne finale.
This is a minor quibble about a nail-biting odyssey into a contemporary Hades.
