It Is in Us All

Cosmo Jarvis shines in Antonia Campbell-Hughes’s outstanding if elusive Irish drama.

Cosmo Jarvis

It may be coincidence but for those in the UK the arrival on our screens on the same day of both this film and Silent Land could not be more appropriate. That's because it enables us to celebrate two remarkable women simultaneously: Poland’s Aga Woszczynska and Ireland's Antonia Campbell-Hughes. In each case the film that they have given us is their first full directorial feature and, if neither work is perfect, both mark out the filmmaker as an artist of exceptional promise. In the case of Campbell-Hughes, the writer and director of It Is in Us All, she has already had a career as a fashion designer as well as being an actress (she has a small but not unimportant role in this film) and she now displays outstanding potential in what is for her a new field.

The central figure in It Is in Us All is Hamish Considine (Cosmo Jarvis) who travels to Donegal to visit a cottage that he has inherited from his late mother's sister. We follow him as he takes to the road in a rental car and these early scenes immediately gain from the way in which Piers McGrail photographs the landscape. But the journey is brutally interrupted when Hamish is involved in a car crash with another vehicle, one that contains two teenagers who are speeding. Hamish wakes up in hospital with significant injuries, but he makes light of them and is soon in the house which now belongs to him. One of the teenage boys had died in the crash and Hamish attends the funeral where he meets the victim’s mother (that’s the role taken by Campbell-Hughes). Later he is visited by Ewan (Rhys Mannion) the 17-year-old survivor who had been the best friend of the dead youth and the shared experience of coming so close to death and yet surviving it draws these two together.

It's an absolute pleasure to see how Campbell-Hughes tells the story letting the narrative flow, capturing the rural atmosphere (Ewan works with his grandfather who has a dairy farm) and collaborating closely with her expert editor John Walters: she has a true cinematic eye. She also has the advantage of working with a very fine cast. Jarvis first came to my attention in Lady Macbeth (2016) and then in Calm with Horses (2019) and he has become one of the finest actors of his generation. As Hamish he is riveting: he makes him absolutely real to us even though the character he portrays is a reserved man not easy to fathom. We do recognise that Hamish’s father in whose business he works (this being a cameo role for Claes Bang) treats him coldly and it is apparent that he is realising that to have lived in Donegal, his mother's birthplace, would most likely have been far more satisfying to him than the life that he has actually led. Indeed, triggered by an old photograph that he finds of himself and his mother visiting her sister in Ireland (an event he was too young to remember), he comes to blame his father for imposing his will on his mother as he has also doubtless done on Hamish himself. Hamish reaches the conclusion that in his mother’s case she had been forced to leave her own country on marrying.

The other key role, that of Ewan, is played by an actor unknown to me, Rhys Mannion, and he too acts with the utmost conviction. Indeed, everything about the filmmaking is so well judged that It Is in Us All would be a masterpiece had the story lent itself to that. What prevents this from happening, in my eyes at least, is the elusive nature of the tale when it comes to how it should be read. We learn only a limited amount about both of the central protagonists but in Ewan’s case there does appear to be a sexual attraction to Hamish. However, the latter, who is in his thirties shows no obvious signs of reciprocating. But then the film may be in part about repression and denial. In both Hamish and Ewan one can detect a deep-buried dissatisfaction with what life offers them and Ewan speaks of the thrill of speeding as something almost ecstatic: it makes him feel more alive than anything else, yet pursuing it could be close to a death wish. All of this is interesting, but rather too much has been left for us to surmise (even the meaning of the film’s title is elusive). Yet, even if that weakens the drama, this is a film that should be seen.

MANSEL STIMPSON

Cast: Cosmo Jarvis, Rhys Mannion, Antonia Campbell-Hughes, Claes Bang, Isaac Heslip, Keith McErlean, Mark O’Halloran, Shashi Rami, Lalor Roddy, Peter Trant, Paul Tylak, Paulinę Hutton.

Dir Antonia Campbell-Hughes, Pro Emma Foley and Tamryn Reinecke, Screenplay Antonia Campbell-Hughes, Ph Piers McGrail, Pro Des John Leslie, Ed John Walters, Music Tom Furse, Costumes Gemma Keenan and Cynthia Fortune Ryan.

Pale Rebel Productions/Savage Productions-Blue Finch Films Releasing.
92 mins. Ireland. 2021. UK Rel: 23 September 2022. Cert. 15.