WC

A DECADE after hoodwinking the likes of George Clooney and Kenneth Branagh into making involuntary cameos in The Book that Wrote Itself, Liam O Mochain returns with a grimy, zero-budget feature set in the lavatory of a Dublin jazz club.

You have to hand it to the man. Dump him in the Arctic with no money and no camera equipment and he would knock together a film and get it screened at the Northern Lights Megaplex.

WC, filmed back in 2005, finds the director playing a compulsive gambler who, following a period in prison, is forced by his dad, to whom the waster still owes money, into working as a lavatory attendant in the family bar. He hands out mints, grumpily accepts small change and makes friends with the Russian immigrant who works next door in the girls' loo.

It transpires that Katya (Julia Wakeham) travelled to Ireland with the intention of working as a child-minder, but, after discovering no such job existed, was forced to become a prostitute. She is now on the run from people traffickers.

WCis a rough-and-ready piece of work that – the lavatory attendant phenomenon being very much a mid-decade affair – already feels a tad past its sell-by date. O Mochain keeps his hands rigidly by his sides at all times, as if he is planning to launch himself into a set dance and, though the other performers work hard, they never distract from the whiff of varnished teak that hangs about him.

More seriously, O Mochain’s decision to include a graphic sexual assault fatally imbalances what is, for the most part, an agreeably mainstream affair.

Still, it’s cheering to encounter further evidence that O Mochain, a uniquely eccentric Irish talent, remains as committed as ever to making cinema against the odds. The very fact that WC exists is cause for a degree of restrained celebration.

Directed by Liam O Mochain. Starring Liam O Mochain, Julia Wakeham 16 cert, Movies@Dundrum, Dublin; Eye, Galway; SGC Dungarvan, Waterford, 80 min★★