Josie (Pat Shortt in a revelatory performance) is, to borrow a term from our pre-PC history, a village simpleton. Though widely regarded as ‘harmless’, he elicits both kindness and contempt in his neighbours. Anne-Marie Duff’s shop-girl is prepared to give him the occasional dance or bag of apples. Others are rather less tolerant of his eccentricities.
Still, working in dilapidated garage in a neglected part of rural Ireland, he seems contended enough. Indeed, when David, a local teenager comes to work with him, it looks as though he may even have a real friend.
Director Lenny Abrahamson and screenwriter Mark O’Halloran, the creative force behind Adam And Paul, our favourite Irish film, may well have been hitting the Tarkovsky again. Like the defining work of the Russian master, their new film is unhurried, starkly composed and quietly devastating. Shots of discontinued railway track give way to shots of barely used petrol pumps. Even the low electrical hum that passes for noise pollution in rural Ireland is scarcely discernable. In Garage nothingness takes more than a supporting role.
Like Adam And Paul, the low-key naturalism is played to tragicomic effect. This rural Ireland is as brutal as the aesthetic. Puppies are drowned with something less than solemnity and an old horse tied to tyre seems, like Josie, doomed to stay in the same place forever.
As the drama plays out through repetition and routine, Beckett springs to mind. And like much of that playwright’s work, Garage’s gut-kick denouement will have you calling for a stretcher.