Dead Man’s Money – where there’s a will there’s room for fear, uncertainty and doubt (Belfast Film Festival) #bff24

Screened as part of the 2024 Belfast Film Festival, Paul Kennedy’s new film Dead Man’s Money shows a lot of promise with great casting and some interestingly-constructed characters set loose in a close-knit community as a couple try to tie down their long-term financial security.

A childless couple run the local pub. The husband also puts a lot of work into a local farm. Both are owned by his uncle who has become flaky and workshy in recent weeks. Pauline fears that Young Henry might be labouring in vain if he doesn’t stand to inherit the farm and the pub from Old Henry. Maybe they should ask? Then the reason for Old Henry’s distraction is revealed: he’s spending a lot of quality time with Maureen Tweed, a woman from the village who has been thrice widowed. Will she obstruct Young Henry’s entitlement?

Judith Roddy and Ciarán McMenamin make a fun rural couple. Both Pauline and Young Henry are hard-working, but it’s Pauline who is the more hard-nosed and directly-spoken of the two. For a while – not least because of an opening quote, and the five act structure – it feels like they’ve been written as Lady Macbeth and the Thane of Cawdor … but that notion feels like it is stretched quite thin as the plot develops. While Roddy is fierce and can be brutally heartless, she still keeps a twinkle in Pauline’s eye and there’s a playfulness between the pair when spirits are up.

For a long time, Pat Shortt gives little away as Old Henry. In later scenes, he becomes more forthright, squaring up to the pressure coming from a Young Henry who has finally grabbed the inheritance bull by the horns. While Pauling and Young Henry fear Maureen – known as ‘Widow Tweed’ behind her back – Kathy Kiera Clarke plays her as an non-threatening woman who is quite unperturbed by the couple’s lack of manners. Into the mix comes Gerry the Wheels (Gerard Jordan), a henchman who sings rebel songs in his car, a republican with a paramilitary past and a violent future if you cross his palm with silver. He’s not the subtlest of characters, but serves the plot well. Watch out for the fine musical cameo by Mollie McGinn and Orláith Forsythe (Dea Matrona).

Ultimately, Dead Man’s Money suffers a bit of a slow puncture in the third act. There’s a very suspect bent-over-the-pool-table bonk scene that would have been better cut even shorter and solely played for laughs. Some non-emergency LED lighting remains on even though the pub is in the middle of a power cut. And having established that Pauline and Young Henry run Old Henry’s pub between them, when they disappear off to another room on one of the busiest nights of the year, the audience spend twenty minutes worrying about the mayhem in the main bar behind them. To make matters worse, their absence is on the mind of Gerry who seeks them out to say that there’s no one behind the bar and the punters are thirsty. Any sense of reality is lost, and there’s a heavy reliance on suspending disbelief. A couple of shots of a young lad from the village helping pull pints could have made this last annoyance go away.

Split into chapters, and full of scenes that separate pairs of characters away from the rest, Dead Man’s Money feels like a stage play that has been beautifully shot on film. It’s a fun 82-minute watch, but for me, the dark tragicomedy storyline is let down by its dramaturgy and believability (even in the rarefied world that has been constructed).

Belfast Film Festival runs until Saturday 9 November.

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