The Hit Producer review: words don’t come easy in this eye-bogglingly strange Irish comedy thriller

Yes well. Good luck to Kevin de la Isla O’Neil and the people behind this eye-bogglingly strange comedy (I think) thriller. They made the thing for around €12,000 and it can’t be denied that it looks as if it cost about one-and-a-half times as much. It exists. It is in cinemas (if you move quickly). It features a characteristically terrifying cameo from the always-welcome Karl Shiels. It has a great title sequence. What else? Did we mention that it exists?

Familiar face Michelle Doherty plays Katelin, a film producer who, in the opening scenes, witnesses an unsuccessful attempted murder and – for reasons that make more sense than most else that follows – is pressed into finishing off the poor chap. Two years later, she is combining her duties as a low-budget film hustler with a sideline in nocturnal assassination. She’s a producer and a hit-woman. She is, if you will, the Hit Producer. (For our own sakes, we must hope that the film is only partially autobiographical.)

What follows defies all lucid summary. Like around 25 per cent of unmade scripts by young Irish men, The Hit Producer features ruthless kingpins, comedy hoods and quips that may have made sense before anybody was required to speak them aloud. Referring to a bent copper, someone actually says: "He's dirtier than a bisexual nymph." What is that even supposed to mean? Are they going for "nymphomaniac"?

Chief among the problems is an uncertainty of tone. At times, the picture looks to be attempting real grit. Elsewhere, as when a man in a porkpie hat farts repeatedly, we appear to be leaning towards a dramatised Viz cartoon. No genre I would seek out requires quite so many women to be punched or kicked in the stomach. (Just two. But that's enough.)

Mr de la Isla O’Neil certainly has a style. It largely manifests itself through droning electronics and a puzzling inclination towards promiscuous time-lapse photography. Doherty wields charisma and works hard at wrestling the unsayable dialogue into submission.

By golly, it fights back. “You noticing that is like Elmer Fudd noticing Bugs Bunny is a fucking rabbit,” somebody else says. David Mamet need not beware.