DIR/WRI: Carmel Winters PRO: Cathleen Dore, Alan Maher, Martina Niland DOP: Kate Mc Cullough ED: Mary Finlay DES: Padraig O’Neill Cast: Aisling O’Sullivan, Stephen Moran, Eileen Walsh, Mick Lally
Tackling difficult subject matter head on in a clinical style that recalls the works of Michael Haneke, writer/director Carmel Winters’ debut feature Snap is an often impressively mounted though rather dour and over determined examination of the far reaching psychological effects of abuse. Constructed as a puzzle or mystery, Snap cuts back and forth between several different timelines to reveal disturbing, often uncomfortable truths about the complex relationships between several different generations of an Irish family.
The film opens with Sandra (Aisling O’Sullivan) agreeing to be interviewed by a local documentary crew in her apartment. Several years back, her son Stephen (Stephen Moran) abducted a young child, creating a moral uproar in the media and the local community and demonizing Sandra in the process. Attempting to clear her name, Sandra’s often combative and cynical exterior is exposed on camera as she both unveils and withholds information form her past, leaving the viewer throughout uncertain of her true intentions.
Winters cuts between the interview or the present day and the explicit details of the incident itself in which Stephen alternately cares for and tortures the child in his grandfather’s house. This proves to be more than significant if not a little bit thematically contrived as the film eventually ties up its fragments at the climax painting an ambiguous and unsettling picture of the paterfamilias and his influence on both daughter and grandson.
The director artfully pieces together a portrait, an intimate snapshot of a damaged family through Sandra’s recollections and Stephen’s viewing of old 16mm film and videos as they both try to deal with and come to terms with their past. While initially an enigmatic, dramatically bracing and mysterious creation unfortunately devolves into a more routine psychological study as the story and its strands are methodically connected. There is an unrelenting grimness to the proceedings that becomes progressively more oppressive as the running time wears on and while Winters is certainly to be commended for dealing with sexual abuse in a sensitive and direct manner, there is no real light and shade in the execution.
We get that Sandra is angry, messed up about sex and her relationship with her father from the disarming candidness she expresses in front of the camera so do we really need a scene where she picks up a crusty, drunken old fart played by the late Mick Lally at a chipshop, takes him home and has sex with him devoid of an ounce of joy or pleasure?
Aside from Sandra’s relationship with her best friend played with a mischievous glint in her eye by Eileen Walsh, levity is in short supply which makes Snap for all it’s merits, the gritty, tactile quality of Kate McCullough’s cinematography, the uniformly strong performances particularly from O’Sullivan a tough film to sit through. Now this may be the filmmakers intention and certainly the methodical style and overtly serious tone would suggest that they have achieved their aim but the film does not reveal any original insights into it’s provocative subject matter, instead lingering on it’s misery as formalism aesthetic.
Though it does also investigate how technology and media can twist, alter and reconstruct memory to create different, conflicting version of the truth this aspect of the story felt somewhat undermined by the literalism of the film’s closing scenes. Though flawed and sometimes coming off as an extended therapy session, Snap shows Winters to be a director of some promise with an intelligent command of style and subject matter.
Derek McDonnell
Snap is released on 8th April 2011.
