Film Review: Lakelands is an authentically modern Irish coming-of-age tale

Cork's Éanna Hardwicke plays a GAA star who's the life and soul of the party — who suffers a severe concussion

Lakelands, a film starring Eanna Hardwicke and Danielle Gilligan

• Lakelands 
• ★★★★★

They breed ’em tough in Cavan, and they don’t come much tougher than Cian Reilly (Éanna Hardwicke), a mainstay in his local GAA football team and the life and soul of the party as Lakelands (15A) begins.

But when Cian suffers a severe concussion during an altercation in a nightclub, he is obliged to reassess what toughness really means. Unable to play football or help his father Diarmuid (Lorcan Cranitch) on the family farm, Cian starts to wonder who he truly is. When his old debs partner Grace (Danielle Gilligan) returns from London to nurse her ailing father, we assume that she will prove a guiding light as Cian charts a new identity — but life, and Lakelands, is nowhere as straightforwardly simple as all that. Written and directed by Robert Higgins and Patrick McGivney, Lakelands is a penetrating exploration of what it might mean to rebuild your perception of yourself.

The Midlands setting might easily have lent itself to all manner of Bog Irish cliché, but Higgins and McGivney have delivered an authentically modern Irish film. Bernie (Gary Lydon), for example, is the kind of old-school GAA coach who espouses a footballing philosophy of clattering everything that moves (the ball, opposing players, the ref if necessary) but he’s also a multifaceted character who sees the big picture in terms of what the GAA club represents to its community.

For that matter, Lakelands is a big picture kind of movie: The setting might be Cavan, but Cian’s journey — the discovery that a person is not defined by what he or she does, but who you allow yourself to be — is universal. Beautifully shot by Simon Crowe, and directed with an impressive assurance by Higgins and McGivney (both helming their feature-length debuts), Lakelands is a poetic but unsentimental coming-of-age drama, with Éanna Hardwicke and Danielle Gilligan both excellent.