The Irish road movie should be a non-starter of an idea. After all, the car will barely have got into third gear before you run into one coast or the other. No lonely highways stretching to infinity. No ghost towns alone in dusty emptiness.
That has not stopped a clatter of film-makers having a go. Lance Daly, the versatile director of Black ’47 and Kisses, now attacks the genre with a baggy, crowd-pleasing beast that ends with a brilliantly mounted trad session. Some of the characterisation is a bit (no pun intended) one-note, but hats off to anything that can send audiences out on such a high.
The picture is also notable for discovering a striking new talent. Megan Nic Fhionnghaile, from Gaoth Dobhair in the Donegal Gaeltacht, plays young Shona McAnally, a fiddle player who seems to have fallen out of love with the music. That estrangement is not unconnected to tensions between her and a harried mother (Sarah Greene, in typically feisty form) with a robust turn of rebuke.
There are variations within that aggressive duet, but mother and daughter are playing themes familiar to all families everywhere. Whatever one wants, the other does not.
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Trouble (and escape) comes when a wandering band of eccentrics, headed by a strangely garbed Aidan Gillen, rattles its way into town. “Do you want to be in a band?” one asks. “Sorry, I f**king hate trad,” Shona replies. Her resistance doesn’t last. Before too long she and Mickey (Dallán Woods), her younger brother, light out for the territory with their irritating new friends.
Opinions will differ as to what we are supposed to make of the travellers. Alternately dipsy and pretentious, they exemplify all that is most self-important in those too pleased with their “alternative” lifestyles. Is nailing your phone to the car dashboard really such an act of radical rebellion? At any rate, they provide Shona with some relief from teenage stress and – surely no spoiler – ultimately offer her a route back to the music she can’t admit to loving.
Gillen, whose presence helped the film get financing, is clearly having an utter ball with his character’s mad hats and pretentious pontification. “That phone stands between you and who you want to be,” he says. “Set yourself free.” Why anyone would take such advice from a fiftysomething apparently wearing East 17’s cast-off parka from the Stay Another Day video is entirely beyond me. But when we were young and foolish we were young and foolish.
The relationship between gang and new disciple generates agreeable picaresque adventures as they happen upon one leafy location after another. The film is essentially a rite-of-passage story, with Nic Fhionnghaile, who had never even done a school play before, conveying grudging acceptance of inevitable compromise.
Strong support comes from Peter Coonan as her dad and Woods as Mickey, a sharp kid with an awareness of where this all has to end. Cathal Coade Palmer is touching as a posher kid with a talent for churning acoustic guitar. Greene’s abandoned mum is placed in a position not unlike that endured by Frances McDormand in Almost Famous. Here hippies, rather than rock stars, have kidnapped her child.
Ultimately what sells Trad are the music sequences. Daly cuts to the rhythms, relishes audience joy and plucks out the players’ often passionate concentration. Few recent fiction films have thumped along so convincingly to the louder beats of the traditional form. Premiering at Galway Film Fleadh in 2025, Trad triggered a riot of applause that powered the film towards the event’s audience prize. It is best enjoyed with a similarly enthusiastic crowd.
In cinemas from Friday, May 8th
