Fair play to Paul Mescal. Even when he’s on the Oscar trail he doesn’t forget Dublin

You have to hand it to Paul Mescal. Deep into his Oscar campaign for Aftersun, the Kildare man found time to attend the opening film of the 21st Dublin International Film Festival. Three days later, back in Los Angeles, he was presenting an award with Zendaya at the Screen Actors Guild. That’s dedication. The Dublin festival kicked off with Mescal playing the returning prodigal son to Emily Watson’s flinty mother in Saela Davis and Anna Rose Holmer’s God’s Creatures. Already reviewed in these pages from Cannes, the film, set in the Irish northwest, suggests a less emotionally heated variation on Federico García Lorca’s tragic folk dramas.

God’s Creatures was the first in an eccentric series of Irish films receiving their domestic premieres over the opening weekend. The bravest may have been Ciaran Creagh’s Ann. The hotly tipped Zara Devlin, a native of Cookstown, gives a focused performance as Ann Lovett, the Longford teenager who died giving birth in a grotto nearly 40 years ago. Creagh, using long takes, begins in something like real time as one character hands over to another – priest, teacher, mother – to form a cinematic daisy chain while Lovett takes her last, doomed journey. The film strives for a visual poetry that is just out of reach but succeeds in summoning up the wretchedness of Lovett’s isolation. Everyone and no one is to blame.

[ I was Ann Lovett’s boyfriend ]

Andrew Legge, who has been making innovative shorts for close to 20 years, moves into features with the imaginative Lola. The film concerns a pair of English sisters who, during the second World War, build a machine that allows them to intercept broadcasts from the future. The scenario permits Legge to ask tricky questions about how foreknowledge, of both culture and public affairs, might lead to triumph and disaster. The closing sections, revisiting an oft-examined “what if…”, spins off its axis a tad, but one remains intrigued as to how the narrative will tie up its many strands.

[ Oscar nominations 2023: Donald Clarke on an astonishing, record-shattering year for Irish film ]

Now something of a veteran, Fintan Connolly, director of Trouble with Sex, returned with a strange beast entitled, sparsely, Barber. Aidan Gillen plays a private detective of that name, recruited to find the missing granddaughter of a wealthy widow. Conspicuously acknowledging its origins in the lockdown era – masks and elbow bumps – the film doesn’t quite succeed in imposing an LA-noir aesthetic on contemporary Dublin. Characters refer casually to “gumshoes”. Femme fatales emerge smokily from the shadows. The central corruption, detected early, doesn’t get much more twisty as the action progresses. Kudos goes the way of the cinematographer Owen McPolin, who makes something glassily beautiful of the city. But this feels like an optimistic pilot for a TV series unlikely to progress to a second episode.

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Liam Carney, one of our most gruffly appealing actors, appears as a corrupt cop in Barber and as a gravely ill Viking enthusiast in Claire Dix’s warm-spirited Sunlight. The key scenario is set up early and then doesn’t really go anywhere. Barry Ward, always there for off-centre charm, plays a former addict who, evading the chemical temptations of old associates on the corner, lifts himself up with the assistance of Carney’s no-nonsense sponsorship. Tensions prickle when the older man suggests the possibility of assisted dying. This is a serious subject treated responsibly through enlightened, if somewhat on-the-nose, debate. But the narrative sits flatly on the screen as we move from one set piece – a musical tribute to the dying man, a pre-emptive Viking funeral – to another in disappointingly meandering fashion.

Sometimes all you need is a bunch of first-class talking heads. Jim Sheridan returned to Dublin International Film Festival with Peter O’Toole: Along the Sky Road to Aqaba. Coming across as companion piece to the recent Ghost of Richard Harris, Sheridan’s documentary does, indeed, settle largely for contributions from the great and good: Derek Jacobi, Brian Blessed, Kenneth Branagh. Still sharp as her 10th decade approaches, Siân Phillips refers to her ex-husband as “O’Toole” throughout, but, despite some shoddy treatment, she, like everyone else in the film, remains besotted with a man who, the world seems to now categorically accept, was born in Leeds and not Connemara. The most entertaining contributor is surely a twinkly, wryly amused Anthony Hopkins. His eyes still light up at the thought of his old pal.

[ Jared Harris on his father, Richard: ‘The conflict he experienced as an Irishman in London gave him a sense of purpose’ ]

In recent years, the Reel Art strand from the Arts Council has livened up festivals with singular, offbeat work that shows the virtues of ignoring the rule book. Cara Holmes’ Notes from Sheepland, a study of Orla Barry, is no exception. Barry, an artist and a sheep farmer, is seen blurring the lines between those two pursuits in a witty, unclassifiable nonfiction piece that works performance in with hard-nosed meditation on the business of raising livestock. The cinematographer Luca Truffarelli captures bewitching images that move from bucolic landscape to close-ups dealing in texture alone. One insert warns against anthropomorphising animals while, elsewhere, we can’t stop ourselves making friends with the future contents of a shepherd’s pie. A wholly satisfying oddity.

Meanwhile, the festival was offering first Irish outings to the best in world cinema. Three hitherto unseen titles stood out for this writer. Michal Blaško’s startlingly relevant Victim set up an ingenious moral conundrum to tease out the hypocrisies and self-deceptions of anti-Roma prejudice in the contemporary Czech Republic. A Ukrainian mother inadvertently stirs up a hornet’s nest after her son is apparently assaulted outside their block of flats. Before long neo-Nazis are turning up at marches in her support. Tense and troubling.

Produced for the BBC’s apparently indestructible Arena strand, Leah Gordon and Eddie Hutton’s Kanaval: A People’s History of Haiti tells the story of that island by blending archival footage with shots of contemporary carnival. A great deal of information in a digestible package.

And then there was Quentin Dupieux’s characteristically bananas Smoking Causes Coughing. I took the latest film from the French director of Deerskin as a pondering of how the heroes of an imaginary antismoking campaign – here low-rent superfigures called the Tobacco Force – would fare if trusted with protecting the world from rejected Dr Who baddies. The film is as delightfully off-kilter as that sounds. Keep an eye out.

Dublin International Film Festival 2023 runs until Saturday, March 4th

This article was amended on March 1st, 2023, to clarify details of Notes from Sheepland