A good movie

I wasn’t really sure what to expect from this movie but, since it was included in the ‘They Shoot Pictures, Don’t They?’ list, I thought I might as well check it out. Concerning Alan Clarke, he seemed to have a decent reputation, it was actually the first movie from this director that I saw and I will definitely check his other work if I have the opportunity. It’s also interesting that it was produced by Danny Boyle a few years before he made ‘Shallow Grave’, his really cool directorial debut. To be honest, I have to admit that I had no idea what this movie was about before watching it but I think it was more powerful this way. I wonder if I would have been able to figure out what it was all about without the sentence mentioning ‘The Troubles’ at the beginning (probably not). Anyway, since I didn’t know what was going to happen, the very first scene had such an impact, it was really effective. Indeed, even though it might seem very basic but I think there was something quite elaborate about these long tracking shots, completely silent (except for 3 lines of dialogues which really shocked because they were so unexpected) and no music or comments. However, another tricky thing with this movie was that they repeated this 18 times. As a result, it became quite repetitive and I was wondering if this approach was actually really effective after all. However, because of its repetitive aspect, because all these murders/executions started to look the same at some point, I started to feel like some kind of numbness which was appropriate and it was probably the effect that the makers wanted to achieve. What was also so intriguing was that they didn’t give us any information about the perpetrators or the victims, in fact, when each segment started, you didn’t actually know which one they were following. They also didn’t give any reason or motivations for these killings giving such a bleak and random feeling and it was again so effective this way. Sure, for the Unionists and Irish republicans, it was all justified but, after killing each other for decades, the end-result didn’t feel much different than what was displayed in this movie. Anyway, it turned out to be an experimental movie, something quite unique and I really enjoyed it, that’s for sure. 

7/10