Having disappeared for a year, a troubled woman returns to her home in
Northern Ireland, rekindling her intense bond with her sister.
Review by
Eric Hillis
Directed by: Cathy Brady
Starring: Nika McGuigan, Kate Dickie, Nora-Jane Noone, Martin McCann, David Pearse
As you can imagine, we're not great when it comes to dealing with grief,
trauma and other mental health issues. "Ah sure, have a pint, it'll be
grand." No wonder Kelly (Nika McGuigan), the troubled protagonist
of writer/director Cathy Brady's Wildfire, runs away from her home on the Northern side of the Irish border.
Selfishly, she didn't tell her sister, Lauren (Nora-Jane Noone),
that she was leaving, so it's no surprise that when she returns home out
of the blue a year later she isn't immediately embraced with open
arms.
After the initial anger, Lauren welcomes her sister, inviting her to stay
in the home she shares with her husband Sean (Martin McCann).
Childhood memories are rekindled, but so too is the legacy of the loss of
their parents. Their father was killed in a terrorist bombing. Their
mother is believed to have killed herself soon after, though there are
suspicions she may have been murdered, having confronted her husband's
killers. Regardless, as is the Irish way, it's all been swept under the
carpet. Lauren and Kelly are expected to get on with their lives, even
while the men responsible for the loss of their parents live in their
community, absolved of their crimes as part of the Good Friday Agreement
(can you imagine the UK government allowing Islamic terrorists to return
to their communities?). Kelly is the spare piece Lauren has been ignoring,
but the wardrobe is set to collapse in spectacular fashion.
The mentally troubled yet free-spirited female protagonist is nothing
new, but usually it's a male lover who is charged with their care, and
such mental issues are often problematically presented as "sexy" (Betty Blue
being the prime example of this). Wildfire takes the trope
and sets in within a sibling relationship rather than a romantic or sexual
pairing, but there is a certain platonic romance to the love Lauren and
Kelly clearly feel for one another. When they eventually let out their
frustrations by engaging in a wild dancefloor stomp to Them's 'Gloria',
there's an erotic charge to the ritual that borders on incestual. With the
world around them telling them to shake off the past and move on, Lauren
and Kelly realise that they're on their own, that nobody else can fully
understand the grief they've been left to process.
Brady does a good job of portraying the new Northern Ireland while
acknowledging the many ghosts that linger from the not too distant past.
When an Eastern European worker at the Amazon-esque distribution centre
that employs Lauren mocks her boss's limp, she's informed by her
co-workers that the woman lost her leg in a bombing. The distribution
centre is itself built on the site of a market that was torn apart by a
bomb. It's the stuff of Poltergeist, but it's all too real.
One of the film's more tender moments sees Lauren and Kelly take a dip in
a river that straddles the border. The two women recall how as children
they would lie in the river, their floating bodies present in two nations
at once. Wildfire straddles a border itself, one between
gritty social realism and magic realist melodrama. It succeeds as an
exemplary model of the former, but in its final act it goes off the rails
and may even provoke some unintentional laughs with a misjudged and
unearned late beat involving a possible message from beyond the grave. Had
the film climaxed with the aforementioned ritualistic bonding dance, it
would be one of the year's most striking directorial debuts, but there's a
half hour still to go after that point, and none of it is as satisfying as
the powder keg drama that preceded it.
Wildfire is made more poignant by the knowledge of
McGuigan's untimely passing with cancer while the film was in
pre-production. On the evidence here, the disease has robbed us of a great
Irish talent. There's impressive work done across the board here, even if
the movie doesn't ultimately hold together, and Wildfire is
an example of how far Irish cinema has come in terms of quality over the
last decade. As far as the future of Irish filmmaking is concerned, I
really do think it'll be grand.
Wildfire is on Prime Video UK
now.