Ballywalter – a refreshingly honest exploration of depression with strong performances from a feisty Seána Kerslake and a worn-down Patrick Kielty

Shane is ill at ease with himself. He’s living on his own in a shabby two-up two-down and his sense of wellbeing mirrors his lodgings. Once a week he drags himself out to a comedy class in Belfast. And every week, Eileen picks up the fare in her former boyfriend’s taxi.

If you step into Eileen’s taxi, you better fasten your seatbelt and keep your mouth shut in case you get on the wrong side of the driver. With a single phrase she has the superpower of being able to massively escalate or totally defuse a situation, usually the former, rarely the latter.

Ballywalter is a gentle and rather pleasing story of depression, broken dreams and second chances. The road to recovery is bumpy for both Eileen and Shane. Seána Kerslake fills Eileen with an intensity in every situation, a woman with no time for nonsense, but capable of making Wagon Wheel sound like a disco hit that should be played across the clubs of Belfast. And despite her abrupt front, she listens, and learns.

The film explains whether comedy can be used as therapy, and can emerge out of truth and failure. Shane has the latter and needs to be pushed to investigate the former. Eileen has a better grasp of both, but carries enough demons to fill the back seat of her taxi. Stacey Gregg – who gets a lovely cameo in the film – has written a screenplay that appropriately gives all the zinging one-liners to Seána/Eileen. Patrick Kielty depicts a diffident, damaged and quite exhausted character who has my level of genius for crashlanding a joke in the tumbleweed.

When Shane starts playing hooky from his class – much in the same way I did with voluntary French classes on a Wednesday afternoon at university – the pair begin to open up to each other. But can either steer away from their respective destructive direction of travel?

Prasanna Puwanarajah’s debut feature is a refreshingly honest exploration of despair that puts the village of Ballywalter on the map … though local audiences will need to suspend disbelief as it’s depicted as somewhere nearer Holywood (a short drive from the city centre) rather than its real location down the Ards Peninsula. Well worth catching at local cinemas.

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