Here is a terrifically warm and involving Irish movie about two brothers from Cork’s northside; it is moving and funny, with plenty of affectionate shots of the iconic Knocknaheeny water tower looming futuristically over the skyline like a 70s spaceship or one of eastern Europe’s Soviet-era war memorials. Screenwriter Alan O’Gorman and first-time director and story co-creator Brendan Canty deliver a social-realist film with heart, featuring outstanding performances of sympathy and strength, developed from Canty’s 2019 short film of the same name. It’s tough, but capable of delicacy and succeeds in conveying something very difficult to achieve without sentimentality: love of your home town. You can come for the drama and stay for the cheeky hip-hop sequence over the closing credits, a final stretch of sweetness and fun that the movie has more than earned, and which Canty, a former music video director, is more than capable of putting together.
Shane (Diarmuid Noyes) is a young guy once in care, but turning his life around in Cork with wife Stacey (Emma Willis), a baby and a painting-and-decorating business. It is now Shane’s grim task to deal with his younger half-brother Christy (Danny Power), a seething, glowering 17-year-old who has just lost his place with a foster family in Ballincollig on the other side of town owing to an ugly scrap, a video of which is going viral on social media. So Shane brings him back and lets him live in his place for a while on the understanding that he will soon move back out, probably into a grim hostel.
Christy finds that people around the neighbourhood remember him, as they do his late mother – but Christy himself does not remember them, having perhaps suppressed these painful childhood memories. Slowly but surely, Christy begins to fit in. It turns out that fighting isn’t all that he’s good at: he has an unlikely talent for cutting hair, which becomes the talk of the town, especially when he gives a trim to local kid Robot (a nice performance from real-life Cork rapper Jamie “the King” Forde). But he is also in danger of being drawn into the orbit of his scary criminal cousins, and Shane realises that the threat of that hostel might be driving Christy into their arms.
Where another type of movie might have a gravitational pull towards disaster and despair, this one doesn’t; equally, though, it’s under no illusions. There’s always a heartbeat of humour, especially when Christy helps out with painting jobs; he and dopey fellow painter Trevor (Chris Walley) can’t resist weighing themselves on a well-off client’s hi-tech digital scales in his bathroom – synced to the client’s Fitbit, which then goes crazy. It’s a smart, likable picture.
• Christy screened at the Edinburgh film festival, and is out in Ireland and Northern Ireland on 29 August, and the rest of the UK on 5 September.
