Name: Lakelands
Item: Lakelands
Rating: 4

Lakelands

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Director: Robert Higgins, Patrick McGivney

Cert: 15A

Starring: Éanna Hardwicke, Danielle Galligan, Lorcan Cranitch, Dafhyd Flynn, Oisin Robbins

Running Time: 1 hr 40 mins

This must surely be the first time two features set in Granard, Co Longford, have been released on successive weeks. After Ciaran Creagh’s Ann, we get a gripping, restrained study of emotional inhibition that showcases some impressive young actors. The films comes at you stealthily. It doesn’t appear to deal with great concerns. But it ultimately connects deeply with a thoroughly realised rural community.

Robert Higgins and Patrick McGivney, directing, producing and writing, set up their key dilemma with great efficiency. The fast-rising Éanna Hardwicke appears as Cian, a star Gaelic football player and all-round boyo in the tight midlands town. His happy complacency is shattered when, on a night out in a neighbouring hotspot, he gets punched about the head. Initially, the lads react only with bravado. “If I’d been there it would have gone down different,” one barks. “You were there,” he is told. The mood darkens as it becomes clear Cian is enduring the symptoms of concussion. A disarmingly frank doctor puts on a worse-than-we-expected face and informs him that he shouldn’t be playing for some time. But what else is there? On what else does his standing depend?

The script is largely forgiving of the protagonist’s unwillingness – or inability – to face the truth. Hardwicke, so good in Normal People and Vivarium, gives us a man who, competent in so many ways, does not have the equipment to process such head-shaking information. His decent but grumpy father (Lorcan Cranitch, excellent as ever) is more taken up with the lad’s indifferent dedication to helping about the family farm. The voice of reason is provided by his old friend Grace (Danielle Galligan), returning to visit after a spell nursing in London. “It’s hard to belong when you’re one of nine million,” she says, reacclimatising to the old sod.

Shot in damp twilight by Simon Crowe, Lakelands does a good job of conveying the textures of small-town life. This is not the twitching-windows Ireland of the 20th century, but there is still a sense of everyone living in everyone else’s pocket. It is the relationship between Grace and Cian that most engages. Galligan, seen recently in the TV series The Great and Kin, exhibits a rare charisma and a gift for dry comedy that should take her far.