Bad Day for the Cut

Donal is in his forties, lives with his mother on a farm in Northern Ireland, and nothing happens in his life. One night men come into the house and kill her. The police call it a robbery. Donal works out that it was not, and goes after them. What he learns is not a simple murder: it is payment for something his mother did years ago. Chris Baugh directs in his first film. Nigel O'Neill plays Donal. The idea is that the avenger is unsuited to it. Donal cannot fight, cannot handle a gun and is physically inadequate; every move is clumsy, which gives the narrative both tension and black humour. Northern Ireland sits in the background and is not discussed directly. Violence passing from one generation to the next, old accounts that never close, and everyone having done something in the past are all inside the narrative. A second strand involves people trafficking; Donal's path crosses a young Polish man's and the two become unwilling partners. The violence is sudden, short and unadorned; there is none of the choreography of genre. It travelled the festivals and counts among the better low budget revenge films. Who it is for: viewers who like hard Irish and British crime films. Who it is not for: the violence is heavy, most characters are thin, and the shape is a known revenge narrative.