Released to coincide with Seachtain na Gaeilge, the Irish-language feature Báite arrives garlanded with a win from Galway Film Fleadh and an Ifta Award for the composers Eimear Noone and Craig Stuart Garfinkle.
Adapted by Sheena Lambert from her novel The Lake, Ruán Magan’s drama boasts pedigree, handsome visuals and solid, absorbing storytelling, even if its central murder mystery never quite quickens the pulse.
Set against an unusually sweltering September in 1975, it concerns Peggy Casey, a highly strung young landlady who’s attempting to keep her late father’s Gaeltacht pub afloat.
With ghostly echoes of Larisa Shepitko’s Farewell and Ryan Gosling’s Lost River, a nearby reservoir that drowned a larger, earlier village signals the area’s decline and offers the heroine a loaded, metaphorical swimming refuge. When a falling water level reveals a woman’s corpse, presumed to be a relic from the submerged graveyard, the tight-knit community either braces or scarpers.
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The arrival of a Dublin detective, Frank Ryan (Moe Dunford, effortlessly channelling James Garner in The Rockford Files), immediately raises uncomfortable questions about long-buried secrets.
Peggy’s anxiety, which finds an unexpected sounding board in the visiting garda, is not confined to the mysterious corpse: her siblings are pressing to sell the pub and variously scatter to London, Australia and Dublin. She stubbornly clings to a vanishing rural inheritance.
Magan, whose extensive background lies in TV and documentary (his first film featured his brother Manchán, the late writer and broadcaster), opens with the cinematographer Ronan Fox’s swooping views of Co Galway’s greenery, establishing the picture’s stately, familiar style.
The mystery proceeds in dependable Agatha Christie nuts and bolts: reticent locals, sidelong glances, histories best left undisturbed. With a dash more weirdness we might have strayed into welcome Cthulhu terrain. Flashbacks to the valley’s flooding finally illuminate the dead woman’s fate and the Casey family’s own fractures.
Lambert’s script quietly nods to contemporaneous sexism, repressed homosexuality and institutional failings. A GAA final, replete with period-perfect triangular sandwiches – another understated triumph for Conor Dennison’s production design – provides a suitably heightened backdrop for the whodunnit moment.
In cinemas from Friday, March 6th
