IN A REMOTE fishing village in Co Kerry, a young man enters a bar which is hosting a wake. His friend has recently drowned in a tragic incident; there is sadness but perhaps not surprise, as his friend is a fisher who, like all fishers in that village, cannot swim.
Moments before the young man entered the bar, his mother said a silent prayer that her son would return from Australia. When their eyes meet as he walks in, she visibly lights up.
This scene from the beginning of God’s Creatures – starring Paul Mescal and Emily Watson, and out in cinemas next week – brings together its intertwined themes of love and tragedy. Together they will reappear in the film, again and again.
Directed by the Brooklyn-based duo Saela Davis and Anna Rose Holmer (The Fits), written by Shane Crowley, and produced by Fodhla Cronin-O’Reilly, the film is about a family reunited, and how the relationship between mother and son is tested when he is accused of a crime.
Mescal plays Brian, whose reasons for departure are hinted at but never properly explained. Watson is Aileen, his mother, a manager at a factory who spends her days supervising the gutting and slicing up of fish. Their family dynamic is strained; Brian and his father Con (Declan Conlon) don’t get on, while his grandfather is violent towards Aileen. Erin, Brian’s sister (Toni O’Rourke) has been able to escape the home to have a family of her own.
When Brian returns, he slots back into the family home, trailing tension with him. He meets old friends, and re-invigorates his father’s old oyster farm.
But he also reconnects with Sarah Murphy (Aisling Franciosi), a childhood friend. This will end up having ramifications not just for them both but for the entire village.
Menace and tragedy
God’s Creatures was shot in Teelin (population 300) in County Donegal, which stood stood in for Kerry. The dramatic natural setting helps to highlight the looming drama in the O’Hara family’s lives.
Behind the camera was Chayse Irvin, who is known for his work with Beyonce, Spike Lee and Andrew Dominik. He utilises the grain and depth of film to bring out the darkness and foreboding in the village setting; on screen, the waves look menacing and the seabirds feel like a hovering threat.
With the film, Cronin-O’Reilly “wanted to tell a story about the world I came from, about the hardships of local fishermen against the cruel sea and how this landscape of crashing waves can make humble lives feel epic.”
The entire film is layered with threats and menace, even though at the heart of it are a pair who love each other deeply. Yet Brian and Aileen are connected perhaps even beyond parental love. There’s something strange about their dynamic.
Speaking to The Journal before the film’s release, Watson agreed: “You can tell from the beginning of it something’s a bit off… she’s obsessed.”
To Mescal, Brian “understands that obsession, and is manipulative of that in places”.
“If there’s no love in that relationship, I don’t think the film works, because there’s nothing then to lose,” he added. Watson was “a very easy person to love”, said Mescal (“Right back at you,” was her immediate response to this), which made the dynamic easier to portray.
With two Oscar nominations under her belt (for 1996′s Breaking the Waves and 1998′s Hilary and Jackie), and acclaimed roles in Punch-Drunk Love (2002) and most recently, Chernobyl (2019), English native Watson is a familiar and consistently strong screen presence. Working together, Mescal (recently nominated for an Oscar in the excellent Aftersun), said that he found Emily could take the lead on set, and that “you get in behind her”.
For him, the centre of God’s Creatures was their characters’ relationship. “I think the screenplay does a lot of the work in terms of examining the strangeness of it,” he said. “I think we just, to a certain extent, just let the screenplay be the screenplay, and we try and operate as much in a loving environment as possible.”
Building characters
The shoot sounds gruelling – they had to film some major scenes while wearing waders in the sea, which were very difficult to walk in, while Watson and Franciosi had to learn how to gut a fish for their roles in the factory. Mescal spent some time learning how oyster farming worked.
They also filmed during the Covid lockdown, so the cast and crew were all in their own houses and isolating when necessary. Some of the early rehearsals had to be done by Zoom, which mustn’t have been ideal for kicking things off.
“You just have to get all four feet stuck in the trough, really,” said Watson when asked about this element.
“I mean, it was a very particular experience, because we were in lockdown. And we were the company of actors in this place, and that was it. And either you were going to be incredibly lonely and it was going to be very difficult, or we were going to form a very strong team. And we just went for it straightaway.”
She added: “In a film like this, you’re building characters, with a writer, with a director, with the other actors, having really interesting conversations.”
Though the actors conversed about their characters, what’s clear in the film is that Aileen and Brian never talk about what matters. They have a silent way of communicating, and know each other so well there are some things they don’t need to say out loud. But there are also hugely important things, about themselves as individuals and their family unit, that they never discuss.
“That’s one of the great strengths of [the film], I think, is they don’t really talk about anything,” said Watson. “They don’t discuss things but you really understand that dynamic, you understand how wrong it is, and how much messed up history there’s been.”
Toxic masculinity
The film appears to be set in the late 1980s or early 1990s, though that’s never made explicit. But to this viewer, the themes present felt as resonant today.
“We never really had strong discussions with Anna and Saela about the time period – I think that’s probably more so a question to them, but I think they were keen for it to maybe aesthetically feel like it’s in the 80s or 90s,” said Mescal.
“But I think emotionally [it is] a current and present story of our time as well.”
Added Watson: “It also predates the ubiquitous nature of the internet, social media, and mobile phones, which would bring another layer too, a different thing.” The fact that there is no social media or mobile phones allows things to happen in the film which only some people witness, but at the same time it doesn’t prevent a community from closing ranks when they choose to take a particular person’s side.
Speaking of this element, there’s a clear sense of toxic masculinity around Mescal’s character – he both imbues it and benefits from it. What was it like to play such a character?
“I think that’s politically what I was interested in being a part of in the film, that it is an examination of that,” he said. “I think Brian does have an awareness of the fact that he’s able to benefit and manipulate the system a little bit. And the system being one, the pub environment, the actual community; but also manipulate the love that he receives from his mother.”
Brian is in contrast to his breakthrough character Connell, in the Normal People TV adaptation, a young man who is trying – consciously or not – to break through the constraints of toxic masculinity. It’s yet another role that shows how Mescal is attracted to characters who reflect an element of masculinity that needs to be teased out and explored.
There’s one particular scene where Brian is clearly under stress. “He knows that he’s under pressure at that moment, and the best way to bring Aileen on side is to threaten leaving,” said Mescal. “And I think that’s somebody who’s smart - in a really dangerous way. That’s somebody who knows how to manipulate people in a way, but it’s also a survival tactic for him, which I think is just really interesting.”
Watson describes that conversation as being “on a knife’s edge”. “Because you can see me going, ‘Oh, hang on a minute, what’s going on here?’ .” When he threatens to leave, “survival instinct” kicks in, because him leaving “is death to her,” said Watson, who has made her name playing complicated, knotty characters who pursue their own aims away from the desires of other people.
When they first read the script, director Saela Davis said that “Aileen really moved us because she felt like someone we’d not experienced before in this way. We saw an opportunity to deconstruct and re-imagine the archetype of a mother constrained to the role of bystander by placing her at the center of our narrative.” If you’ve seen Watson in any other role on screen before, you’ll know, then, why she’s so excellent at Aileen. She’s so good at playing the inscrutable and unexpected.
For co-director Anna Holmer, “It was Aileen’s story, her psychology, and her change of heart that inspired us to make a film where the lives of the women in particular are full and thorough, where their interior lives are as cinematic as those sweeping vistas.”
God’s Creatures is a film that’s about one mother-son pairing, and one young woman in a remote fishing village. But in its exploration of a twisted familial love, and in how a community can turn against its own as a way of condoning toxic male behaviour, its themes are sadly universal.
God’s Creatures is in cinemas from 24 March.
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