In a windswept fishing village, a mother is torn between protecting her beloved son and her own sense of right and wrong. A film by Saela Davis and Anna Rose Holmer, starring Emily Watson, Paul Mescal, Aisling Franciosi, Declan Conlon, Toni O’Rourke, Marion O’Dwyer, Brendan McCormack, and Lalor Roddy.

GOD’S CREATURES

Saela Davis • Anna Rose Holmer
(2022)
★★★★☆

Aileen (Emily Watson), who manages a seafood processing plant in a fishing village, reunites with her son Brian (Paul Mescal) who has returned from Australia at the funeral of Mark, son of Marry (Marion O’Dwyer).

Aileen is surprised by her son’s sudden return home, having never heard from him regarding his whereabouts or what he had been doing while away. Though Brian remains tight-lipped about his troubles, Aileen feels joy in her heart at having the family together again. Brian expresses his desire to revive the family’s oyster farm, which had been abandoned during his absence from the village.

But it’s not easy to restart the oyster farm. The operation requires oysters as bait to begin with, but Brian has returned empty-handed. This leads Aileen to secretly steal oysters from her factory to help her son. Meanwhile, unemployed Brian resorts to stealing fish from other fishermen’s catches to sell for cash.

One night, Aileen and Brian go drinking at a local pub where they run into Sarah (Aisling Franciosi), Brian’s childhood friend. As Brian attempts to rekindle their teenage romance, Aileen decides to head home alone.

The next day, Aileen receives a call from the police about a rape allegation against Brian. Brian claims he was home with his mother all night after they returned from the pub together. The police seek confirmation from Aileen and ask if she’s willing to testify in court. Believing in her son’s good character and having never known him to have problems with women before, she lies to the police, corroborating Brian’s story that he was home with her all night.

Soon, everyone at the factory and in the village learns about Sarah’s rape allegation against Brian. Her situation worsens when the court dismisses the case due to lack of physical evidence, especially after Aileen’s testimony confirming Brian was home that night. This leads many villagers to believe Sarah fabricated the whole story.

The film’s atmosphere and storytelling are captivating, with a notable approach of letting viewers imagine past events without using any flashbacks. We’re left to wonder what actually happened with Brian, an only child, that led him to abandon both his home and the family business. There must have been something that caused a serious rift within the family. His father’s indifferent reaction to his return stands in stark contrast to his mother’s joy, who hopes the family can return to the way things were before.

Brian’s story arc is intriguing, and although the character might seem somewhat one-dimensional, the director made an excellent choice casting Paul Mescal in the role. He perfectly embodies the type of character who exudes charm while concealing darkness beneath a smiling façade.

The directors chose not to show the audience any images of him allegedly harming the woman, leaving viewers questioning whether he is truly a villain. This effectively enhances the emotional tension in the story’s climax when Aileen decides to take matters into her own hands. Emily Watson delivers such an incredible performance.

GOD’S CREATURES premiered at Festival de Cannes in Quinzaine des cinéastes section on 19 May 2022. It received a limited theatrical release in the United States on 30 September, by A24.

Quinzaine des Cinéastes (Directors’ Fortnight) is a renowned parallel selection at the Cannes Film Festival, created in 1969 in the wake of the May 1968 protests by the Société des Réalisateurs de Films (SRF). It functions as an independent, non-competitive showcase for innovative and singular cinematic works from around the world. Originally known as the Quinzaine des Réalisateurs, it was renamed in 2022 to be more inclusive, with Julien Rejl as its current délégué général. The event aims to spotlight emerging talents alongside established filmmakers, embracing diverse formats like shorts, features, fiction, documentaries, and animation without genre or geographic limits. It emphasizes bold mise-en-scène and has launched careers by prioritizing artistic freedom over competition. Since 2002, it hosts the Carrosse d’Or award, honoring visionary directors like Martin Scorsese, Agnès Varda, and John Carpenter.

Paul Mescal Dives Into Darkness In God’s Creatures
It was just a script that I loved, and very quickly I was like, “Can I be in this? How can I be in this? Let me be in this.” I was stoked on it, but in the sense that the film, to my mind, leaves you feeling empty. That’s an effective thing for a screenwriter to be able to communicate on a first read. The next stage was figuring out what the filmmakers thoughts were on Brian; I wouldn’t have [this role] if I didn’t feel like they were interested in filling out the character in a way that is more true to people who commit sexual assault. They’re not just these monstrous kind of people who lurk around, they are people we recognize. And I wanted Brian to feel familiar to people.

Emily Watson on Bonding With Paul Mescal and the Power of Difficult Conversations
First of all, the script was absolutely riveting. Within the first few minutes of reading, you could almost smell the sea air—it was so clearly coming from an incredibly authentic place, and so I immediately wanted to know who the people behind this movie were. It was clearly somebody who really knows this world, as it comes from a place that is very, very deeply felt. We were actually very, very isolated. We filmed when it was level five lockdown in Ireland, and while I’d had a jab in England, they had only given out very few in Ireland at that point, so the COVID protocols were extremely stringent. After that, we all stayed in this hotel with nobody else in it for about 10 days to rehearse, and it was like being sprung out of a cannon. Suddenly, there was this visceral energy, and it helped because the main characters here are very much not head people, they’re quite animalistic. When Aileen lies to protect her son, it’s not a thought-through thing, it’s the instinctive lashing out of a mother.

Paul Mescal and Emily Watson on Building and Breaking a Mother-Son Bond in God’s Creatures
If you removed sexual assault from the film, I wanted that to be—I know this sounds vague and obvious—but I wanted it all to make sense. I wanted you to feel like Brian can go in any direction, up until the point that he goes past the point of no return. So it’s like: How can you make an audience feel sympathy for somebody who goes away to Australia and has a rough time and doesn’t have the emotional capacity to talk about that? And then what is it about his sense of entitlement and his relationship with women that makes him so hard? And I think that was one of the main reasons that I wanted to do the film. I really wanted somebody who commits an act of sexual violence to look familiar to people. I didn’t want it to be a kind of villainous, creepy, obvious template. I wanted it to be somebody’s son, somebody’s friend, somebody who we recognize as “good” in the world. Statistically, people who commit sexual violence know the victim and the victim knows them.