FILM OF THE WEEK: Trad - Reviewed by Roe McDermott

Coming-of-age stories are often framed as acts of departure. To become yourself, the bildungsroman suggests, you have to move away from the expectations that first shaped you, testing boundaries, resisting inherited identities, and pushing against the structures that once felt immovable. The tension is rarely just between childhood and adulthood, but between obligation and autonomy: the fear that becoming your own person might require rejecting where you come from entirely. In Trad, written and directed by Black 47’s Lance Daly, that struggle unfolds through Irish traditional music, transforming sessions and tunes into sites of rebellion, attraction, intimacy and eventual reconciliation.

Set against Ireland’s current resurgence of interest in language, heritage and folk traditions, the film follows Shóna, an 18-year-old fiddle player from Donegal who has grown up immersed in trad music and now desperately wants distance from it. Her frustration is understandable. What once connected her to family and community has calcified into expectation, and Daly smartly understands that young people often reject the things they feel most trapped by before they can return to them on their own terms. When Shóna falls in with Harky, an enigmatic quasi-guru leading a troupe of off-grid young musicians searching for authenticity beyond modern life, the film expands into something looser and more searching: part road movie, part countercultural fantasy, part meditation on what it means to inherit a tradition without being consumed by it.

What makes the film work so well is its understanding that music itself can function as drama. Sessions operate almost like action sequences, with emotional shifts, tensions, seductions, arguments and forgiveness all playing out through rhythm, tempo and performance rather than exposition. A tune can become flirtation, confrontation, escape, or connection. The music sequences have an exhilarating physicality to them, and the film captures the collective intoxication of playing together with enormous warmth. Even viewers with little prior connection to trad are likely to find themselves pulled into its energy.

Newcomer Megan Nic Fhionnghaile is excellent in the central role, bringing an understated naturalism to Shóna that prevents the character from tipping into cliché. She carries the film with a quiet magnetism, conveying both a stubbornness and a searching. Aidan Gillen is fun if slightly underdeveloped as Harky, leaning into the character’s mix of charisma, mysticism and faint ridiculousness. The figure could easily have become a parody, but Gillen gives him enough sincerity to remain intriguing.

The film is less successful when it moves beyond Shóna’s perspective. Several supporting characters remain thinly drawn, particularly her mother (Sarah Greene), whose emotional life feels underexplored despite the centrality of that relationship to the story’s themes. There is also a fascinating film hovering at the edges of Trad about Harky’s group itself: a collection of at least partially middle-class young people engaged in their own kind of cultural rumspringa, rejecting technology and modernity in pursuit of something “real.” The film gestures toward the contradictions and romanticism embedded in that search without ever fully interrogating them.

A hitchhiking interlude towards the end also slightly saps the film’s momentum, and there are moments where the script feels looser than it perhaps intends to. But these shortcomings ultimately matter less because the film’s emotional and musical core is so alive. The music, developed by Declan and Eugene Quinn, Damien Mullane, Laoise Kelly, and Nic Fhionnghaile herself is wonderful, and the way it unfolds with the story makes it feel accessible and engaging even to those with no knowledge of the genre. Daly approaches trad not as a museum piece, tourist attraction or nationalist symbol, but as something messy, social, sensual and living. The film understands that traditions only survive because people continually reshape them, resist them, leave them - and return home again.

By the end, Trad feels less like a film about preserving heritage than about learning how to inhabit it freely. It recognises that coming of age does not necessarily mean severing yourself from where you come from, but finding a way to return without surrendering your autonomy in the process.

Written and directed by Lance Daly. Starring Aidan Gillen, Sarah Greene, Peter Coonan. 90 mins

• In cinemas now. Watch the trailer below: