Tropic Sprockets / God’s Creatures

By Ian Brockway

From Saella Davis and Anna Rose Holmer, “God’s Creatures” is a slow burn meditation on guilt and panic. [Showtimes and a trailer at Tropiccinema.com.] Building with a subtle menace like the eddies of a reef before a storm, the drama gradually increases in its existential angst. The first moments tease in hypnotic movements. One is lulled by the beauty of an Irish fishing village and the farming of oysters. But like the steady tightening of a gear moving to claustrophobia and anxiety we realize we are in the realm of a domestic nightmare. This is not an outright thriller but it is no less violent or panic inducing than Hitchcock or Nathaniel Hawthorne.

The film takes its tone from the day to day Gothic melodrama of Thomas Hardy. Aileen (Emily Watson) is a supervisor and oyster farmer. When she is not on a battered boat hauling mollusks, she is monitoring them on a factory conveyor belt, shell by grimy shell. it is hard, arduous work. Aileen receives no thanks or praise, and her work never varies.

One day, Aileen’s wayward and non-conformist son Brian (Paul Mescal) returns home out of the blue. He happens to make his appearance at a wake. Brian can’t seem to get into the swing of things. His oyster farming is slow and clumsy. He is slothful. The female employees snicker behind his back.

Then suddenly Sarah (Aisling Franciosi), a factory worker, accuses Brian of rape. Aileen is incredulous but as rational accounts come to the fore, Aileen concocts a story. Inch by inch, dialogue by dialogue the tension mounts to a pitch.

Emily Watson has never been better. Her pale pockmarked face is a study in nervousness and laceration. Horribly, Aileen’s face crumples inward before our eyes. Paul Mescal is perfect as the nonchalant yet charming ne’er do well.

This film is measured to a fault and the unease is meted out to perfection. The wondrous trick that “God’s Creatures” pulls is that for the first third of the film, it works as a precise documentary of Irish fishing life. Then suddenly we realize that we are almost in the realm of familial horror, in the mode of Ari Aster’s “Hereditary.”

The black brown decor of an Irish pub has never seemed so melancholy or forbidding.

Write Ian at [email protected]

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