Film Review: Nightride may well be Ireland's greatest B-movie noir
Moe Dunford in Nightride, out today on Netflix
★★★★☆
(15A) stars Moe Dunford as Budge, a Belfast drug-dealer about to make one last big score and get out of the business.
A fairly conventional plot on the face of it, but writer Ben Conway and director Stephen Fingleton take an unconventional approach: the story plays out in real time, and apparently in one long take, as Budge leaves home around 11pm and gets into his car and starts phoning a number of associates: his underling Lefty (John Travers), the loan shark Joe (Stephen Rea), gangster heavy Troy (Gerard Jordan), and his girlfriend, the deal-broker Sophia (Joana Ribeiro).
In fact, roughly 90% of the film takes place in the front seat of Budge’s car, with Moe Dunford on-screen for virtually every second of the running-time.
Dunford is superb here, as Budge starts out cautiously confident of success and gradually, as his plans turn increasingly pear-shaped, morphing into a man strung out on adrenaline and fear. He might be a fan of Michael Mann’s movies — the phrase ‘Time is luck’, used here on a number of occasions, is taken from Mann’s — but Budge is nowhere as self-consciously slick as Mann’s protagonists tend to be.
Instead he’s flying by the seat of his pants, ducking and diving as the twists and turns demand, and there’s plenty of those: Ben Conway’s script is a masterclass in how to blend plot and character, and the result is a piece of bravura film-making that may well be the best B-movie noir Ireland has ever produced.
(Netflix)
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