FILM OF THE WEEK: The Flats - Reviewed by Roe McDermott

Alessandra Celesia’s The Flats is a documentary of rare emotional precision, crafted not from the grand narratives of history, but from the cracks and residue they leaves behind. During The Troubles, New Lodge was one of the most dangerous places in Northern Ireland. The IRA had deep roots there. The British Army responded by flooding the area with troops and installing makeshift bases on the rooftops of high-rise flats. Violence was rife in the streets, the stairwells and the minds of children growing up under siege. This film is an unflinching, deeply compassionate study of personal, intergenerational, and communal trauma.

Its centrepiece is Joe McNally, a man whose emotional landscape is defined by the murder of his uncle Cook in 1975, one of four Catholic workers shot by loyalists at Casey’s bottling plant. Joe was just seven years old, and the loss cracked something open in him that never quite healed. We see Joe today as a man still entangled in that past - furious at the present, distrustful of the future. His manner is jumpy and defensive, his memories as vivid as if they happened yesterday. His scenes are among the most arresting in the film, particularly a sequence in which he and a friend carry a coffin into his flat, staging a reenactment of Cook’s wake. It’s as strange as it is searing: the absurdity of a coffin in a cramped lift, the burden of grief borne floor by floor.

These reenactments, clearly inspired by the work of Joshua Oppenheimer (The Act of Killing), are emotional excavations. Joe lies down in the coffin, contemplating his own death. Later, the same coffin is used to simulate the wake of Bobby Sands. These performances deepen the sense of psychological entrapment and how unspoken grief festers. These scenes are constructed with the collaboration of the subjects themselves, an organic process that makes them feel urgent, not imposed.

But The Flats is not solely about Joe. The film’s beating heart lies in its portrayal of the women of New Lodge - Jolene, Angie, and Jolene’s sister - who carry the burdens of domestic violence, addiction, and caregiving. Angie recounts the time she shot her abusive husband in the hip with an IRA gun, delivered in the same breath as a dry quip about how he refrained from retaliation because the hunger strike was on. This story, told casually, reveals the dark entanglement of personal violence and political context in a way that no academic analysis ever could.

Jolene, a sharp-witted survivor with a beautiful singing voice, describes her complicated feelings about identity and nationalism. When she expresses her outrage at being stripped of her EU citizenship due to Brexit - “I never asked to be British” - her friends advise her to get an Irish passport. The political becomes deeply personal, folded into everyday frustrations and unresolved allegiances.

The most haunting image in the film, however, is Jolene’s sister, who's bedridden and visibly ravaged by drug addiction. Celesia captures this scene with a stillness that refuses to look away, but also avoids voyeurism. There’s no narration, no music to guide our feelings - just the slow devastation of a body overcome by trauma. It’s one of the clearest articulations of inherited grief and the numbing self-medication that has taken the place of ideology for a younger generation left without resources, support or purpose.

The camera finds beauty too. Jolene’s voice, unexpectedly melodic as she sings in a patch of parkland, offers a fragile counterpoint to the surrounding bleakness. In another moment, two women apply makeup and fake bruises to recreate scenes of abuse - “So relaxing,” one says, the irony sharp and heartbreaking. These juxtapositions - song and silence, performance and pain - give the film its texture.

Celesia’s approach is notably non-didactic. She rarely intervenes with overt narration or context. Instead, she embeds herself within the community, listening and asking questions that elicit emotional truths rather than political rhetoric. Her long-standing connection to Belfast (having lived there since 1997) gives her a closeness that is neither exploitative nor sentimental. And yet, as a non-native, she brings a careful observational distance that allows her to ask what locals might leave unsaid.

The film’s sense of place is vivid and precise. The opening image of Gerry sweeping the path outside a shrine to the Virgin Mary sets the tone: care amid decay, ritual amid ruin. The estate, filmed just before its demolition, becomes a character itself - its graffiti, cracked stairwells, and outdated lifts embodying a history that refuses to be buried. When Joe yells down from his balcony at drug dealers below, filming them himself, the moment is as much a cry for help as it is an act of defiance.

Even the smallest details stick: Joe’s dog is named Freedom; a mural of Che Guevara looms beside a hand-scrawled message reading “Blood of an Irish Rebel”; Catholic neighbours light candles in a grotto, while across the road, a Protestant bonfire stack rises in anticipation of the Twelfth. These aren’t symbols placed for effect - they’re part of the living fabric of the place, contradictions and all.

While the film doesn’t promise redemption, it does hint at the possibility of release. Joe’s therapy sessions with Rita Overend from the suicide prevention charity PIPS are among the most emotionally naked moments onscreen. “I want to be happy,” Joe says, through tears. That desire - simple, human, achingly out of reach - resonates louder than any political slogan.

The Flats does not strive for neutrality. It acknowledges that peace came at a cost - not just in what it ended, but in what it left unhealed. “This has gone from a ghetto to a slum,” Joe declares. His expression of anger is sometimes impulsive – at one point he goes on a hunger strike, comparing himself to Bobby Sands and believing it will bring about political change, despite not telling anyone but his neighbours – but the emotion itself is not abstract; it’s aimed squarely at the failed promises of the Good Friday Agreement, at the erosion of solidarity by capitalism, and at the state’s neglect of working-class communities still mired in addiction and poverty.

The Flats doesn’t offer answers, but it asks the right questions - about grief, about memory, about what we inherit and what we pass on. Celesia has listened to the people of New Lodge and in doing so, crafted a work of art that honours their complexity, pain, and spirit without reducing any of it to platitudes or archetypes. Powerful and difficult work.

• In cinemas now.