Directors: Joe Lawlor, Christine Molloy
Talent: Aidan Gillen, Zoe Tay, Michael Thomas, Claire Keelan
Release Date: 27th September 2013
Joe Lawlor and Christine Molloy’s second feature film, following a working relationship spanning over twenty years and various media, is set in the sweltering heat of Singapore, where Gerry Devine, played by Aidan Gillen, has travelled for the funeral of his brother John. At the same time, he is struggling to process his wife’s recently discovered infidelity, and the possibility of his family life in London ― particularly his relationship with his young daughter Sarah ― being irreparably damaged. Once Gerry arrives in Singapore, to his brother’s bustling, Irish-themed hostess bar (the titular Mister John’s), he engages in several abortive attempts to assume (even in a figurative sense) the identity of the deceased: a businessman, husband and father.
In realising these failures, Aidan Gillen’s performance as the damaged, inadequate Gerry borders on the transcendent: Lawlor and Molloy’s direction switches comfortably from naturalistic to oneiric, helped along by a magnificent, throbbing orchestral score from Steven McKeon which threatens at times to overwhelm its lead, but Gillen renders his character’s weakness and disillusionment somehow magnetic. Mister John aestheticises the tractability of identity and the fear of/longing for engulfment attendant to anxiety (and schizoid personality disorder), while a noir-ish plot along the lines of Altman’s The Long Goodbye bubbles underneath, never fully realised, giving the narrative an appropriately porous, tenuous quality. Layered sound production places snatches of dialogue over static camerawork, in the vein of Malick or, most recently, Shane Carruth’s Upstream Colour, while each composition seems to be condensation-irised in Singapore’s feverish humidity: all of which orbits around a virtuosic and touching performance at the film’s centre by Aidan Gillen. A beautiful, reticent, compassionate piece of work.
