Actor Jack Reynor made his mark a couple of years ago as a spoiled Dublin rich kid in Lenny Abrahamson’s troubling What Richard Did. He returns to low-budget realism in a very different Irish drama, playing a young cab driver facing debt as he tries to help his mother (Toni Collette) deal with alcoholism. His character runs on a scale from laid-back exhaustion to the cranked-up verge of breakdown, but Reynor pulls it off with nicely judged finesse. I’m less convinced by Collette, who’s working in a more demonstrative, not to say mannered register; besides, she’s lumbered with an excessively on-the-nose monologue spelling out her character’s psychological state. Gerard Barrett’s second feature isn’t short of integrity, but it’s hampered by solemnity and – even for this school of hard-times realism – a somewhat puritanical refusal of visual appeal.
