God’s Creatures (2022)
Directed by Saela Davis and Anna Rose Holmer
Who’s ready for story time with Daniel Nava? It’s late June 2020 and I get a bad surprise and find myself with some new scars in a psych ward. When the aperture of your life begins to look like ocular manifestations of glioblastomas, and everything is blurry and reduced to tunnel vision, SH axioms like “Help is available” is no longer at the forefront of the prefrontal. It was remarkably tough, but I survived and carried on. Several months later, the scars fade and COVID restrictions are reduced and my favorite coffee shop in Chicago let’s people dine in-doors again. It’s a crisp weekend. I’m caffeinated on a Dark Matter brew, chowing down on a banana nut muffin, and reading. People saunter in and out, until eventually I see a woman from my past. We hooked up a few times, nothing lavish or especially profound about it. We bonded over films and I enjoyed her company but it wasn’t exactly a relationship. There was some resentment (on her behalf) about that. Now she’s a member of a self-described coven of quote unquote witches that would probably (certainly) suggest they are not my biggest fans. I was slightly on edge. But she proceeded to get her coffee and left. I didn’t think much of it, until a half hour later, when someone I did not know approached me. I had my earbuds in and asked them to repeat what they said. Curly-haired and donning an unremarkable mask, they asked me to leave the cafe. This person clearly didn’t work there. Befuddled, I asked why. Their response was, “I know what you did.” I’ve done a lot, so I jokingly requested that they clarify. To which they suggested they’ve read some material on Twitter about me. I smiled, told them to fuck off, and they respectfully obliged. Moral of the story being: some people believe everything they read on the Internet and hurt people would rather not have a one-on-one conversation but instead rely on ill-informed proxies to relay messages. If this sounds bitter, it’s probably because there’s a part of me that still is, but I persevere. I still go to that coffee shop.
Saela Davis and Anna Rose Holmer’s God’s Creatures is about a young man named Brian (Paul Mescal) who returns home. Set in small Irish fishing community, Brian is embraced wholly by his mother Aileen (Emily Watson). He’d been away for a long time and failed monumentally, losing all his money, and needs to recalibrate back home. Aileen, working in an oyster factory, is positively ecstatic about having Brian back. In the meantime, there’s a distinct sense of loss that permeates the community. From death, to break-ups, to the perpetual overcast, to Danny Bensi and Saunder Jurriaans’ eerie score, God’s Creatures leans in heavily on the downbeat. The instigating dramatic event of the film finds Aileen brought in by authorities to confirm Brian whereabouts on a night out. Sarah (Aisling Franciosi), a young woman that works with Aileen, claims that Brian raped her. Aileen vouches for Brian, but it’s a lie. He wasn’t with her on the night that Sarah was raped.
There’s an interesting film here, but Davis and Holmer don’t have the formal skillset to evoke it, and the screenplay is disappointingly underwritten. The analog would be Bong Joon-ho’s Mother, about the lengths to which a mom protects her disabled son. But since God’s Creatures is centered on Aileen’s growing doubts about her son, I suppose I’m critical of how much of a blank slate Brian is to the film. His past is discussed minimally and there’s not much in the way of actual conversation about who he is or what he’s been accused of. He’s just a vapid, empty figure that somehow has his mother’s devoted love. So the dramatic overture of Aileen slowly rescinding that love just strikes me as woefully uninteresting. Sarah, too, is strikingly banal and best described as “victim.” A scene late into the film sees another death and Aileen and Brain as the mourning party of loss. When Sarah lines up to give condolences, she spits at Brian, to which my response was: why did you come to a funeral to spit at someone? The whole effort is a drab, despairing, and ultimately pretty thoughtless exercise. A film like this, you’d imagine, would strive for clarity and dwell on detail. Instead, it flails and leaves you feeling defeated. A feel-bad movie that is just pretty bad.