Directed by Berend and Roel Boorsma. Starring Stuart Graham, Lorcan Bonner, Charlotte Bradley, Jer O’Leary, Laura Vasiliu. Cineworld, 3.45pm ***
Whatever else you might say about this Irish-Dutch co-production, you couldn’t argue that you’ve seen many films like it. Featuring a discordantly multinational cast, set in a slightly displaced version of Ireland, the picture starts out as a study of a dysfunctional family, turns into a kind of road movie and ends in the land beyond sui generis. The reliably brittle Stuart Graham plays the overprotective father of a young boy named Milo (talented Lorcan Bonner).
We gather he has a skin complaint, but the extent and nature of the condition is concealed until late in the picture. After an argument about a school camping trip, Milo lights out for the country and ends up sheltering with a pair of (yes, I’m afraid so) loveably dissolute criminals. Despite the presence of Graham and – as the layabouts – the game Charlotte Bradley and the weather-beaten Jer O’Leary, Berend and Roel Boorsma’s film feels awfully European throughout. (Perhaps it will seem unmistakably Irish to the Dutch.) But that quirky, disorienting mix suits a picture that moves through such defiantly odd narrative territory. Worth absorbing.