Film Review: Barber is thoughtful and nuanced, with real heart

"It’s a classic private eye set-up — Barber is a loner with a healthy disrespect for wealth, and a dogged pursuer of justice"

Barber, starring Aidan Gillen.

• Barber 
• ★★★★☆

Down those mean streets of Dublin a man must go, and that man’s name is Barber (15A) — Valentine Barber (Aidan Gillen), a private investigator commissioned by Lily Dunne (Deirdre Donnelly) to find her missing granddaughter Sara (Isabelle Connolly).

It’s a classic private eye set-up — Barber is a loner with a healthy disrespect for wealth who clashes with the police in the form of Inspector Quinn (Liam Carney), and a dogged pursuer of justice even if his investigation takes him into the highest echelons of power. And there’s no doubt that the writers, Fiona Bergin and Fintan Connolly, have the noirs of Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett in mind (there’s even a brief nod to The Big Sleep, and the Bogie-Bacall repartee about racehorses). Barber isn’t the same league as The Big Sleep (few films are), but it is certainly more than mere pastiche.

Ex-garda to private detective - Val Barber will do anything to find the truth.

The story unfolds in Covid-era Dublin against a #metoo backdrop, and Val Barber himself is a complex creation whose solitary nature is imposed on him by the culture in which he was nurtured. Aidan Gillen gives his world-weary, ex-cop gumshoe a terrific reading, investing the stereotypically cynical persona with a sophisticated emotional palette, while Barber’s relationship with his daughter, Kate (Aisling Kearns), provides a counterpoint to the story’s backdrop of brutalised young women.

The tone is nowhere as bleak as the blackest of noirs tend to be, but Fintan Connolly, who also directs, has crafted a thoughtful, nuanced film that goes beyond the genre’s conventions to deliver a noir with real heart.

(cinema release)