The first half hour establishes that a rural west Cork family are dealing with loss and grief in very different ways. A overbearing father (David O’Hara) shows signs of being a functioning alcoholic. An older son Robbie (Éanna Hardwicke) looks set to blindly follow the family path into the military. The younger son Kevin (Ollie West) is rebelling against authority, a ‘wild child’ styled in the image of his deceased mother. The youngest child of the house, Sally (Michelle Gleeson) is a sweet daughter but nearly as incidental to the plot as a love interest’s dog (who gets a name, Cosmo, but just one scene).
The final hour switches from loss and grief to the burden of guilt, keeping secrets, distrust, and the risk of confession.
As the family heartbreak unfolds over a week, Kevin takes care of a young sparrow with a broken wing in a shoebox, tending it back to health, but reluctant to let it fly free. A visual metaphor of the seventeen year old lad being broken and being trapped in a cage.
Not everything has to be subtle in a movie, but clumsiness and far too overt signposting can be avoided. See the band, see the name of the band on a t-shirt, then be told what it means in Irish even though the character growing up and being schooled in Cork would know that. It’s the first of many details that dulls the lustre of The Sparrow. Just wait until the breath holding begins and you notice the recurring habit of abandoning vehicles (particularly Robbie’s quad bike) in different locations.
There are some lovely scenes. The film does desperation well: a father clutching at every straw to find a missing child; a child locked away from the last tangible links to his mother. The overhead drone shots of a manhunt searching through a forest and along a coastline are beautiful and evoke reflections on recent news stories about searches for Michael Mosley in Greece and Jay Slater in Tenerife. The editing of a pivotal scene on a boat is very confident.
The Sparrow sets out to be a dark tale of anxiety building as fatal secrets are bottled up. Unfortunately, the audience seem to have a total grasp of the facts all the way along, reducing our role to that of being passengers rather than investigators.
Lots of people are casually villainised – Manny the harmless local who must have been a silent witness, a father who might need to confess his role in a traffic accident important to the plot, flirty local girl Hanna (Isabelle Connolly) is made out to be some kind of coquette – yet (slight spoiler that will save you being annoyed) none end up feeding into the film’s conclusion.
There’s a real sense that lots of people’s behaviour and actions – as well as the tragedies that unfold – really have the father at their heart. We’re being directed to look towards son Kevin, but he’s only living through the sins of his much more troubled father. That’s the story I wanted to see, but it’s not the edit of the film that made it to the big screen.
The performances rescue the film from its plotting. O’Hara is unstable and imperious. Hardwicke is never not lost in his grief. Connolly draws the lads in with her character’s carefree spirit.
The ending fails to draw together enough of the threads that have been left dangling in front of the audience. It’s as if Michael Kinirons didn’t lift the final version of his script on his way to the set … or decided to make a watered-down version of a tale that could have been much deeper and darker. For me, that’s the real mystery of this film.
The Sparrow is being screened in Queen’s Film Theatre from Friday 5 July. Let me know what you think.
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