Last night I went to a screening and Q&A of God’s Creatures with Emily Watson (Red Dragon), Aisling Franciosi (The Nightingale), and Toni O’Rourke (Idk). It was at the British Film Institute which was really cool.
The movie is about a mother whose beloved son returns home (to Ireland) after being away (in Australia) for a long time. The return seems to be going mostly smoothly, he and his father butt heads and she had to steal some oysters from her job to get him started on his own operation, but nothing that out of the ordinary for this small religious town.
But after a night at the pub when she leaves early, the next day Sarah, her co-worker, friend, and former almost daughter-in-law, completely changes from the easy going happy girl she was and becomes withdrawn and angry and cold to Aileen (Watson). Soon Aileen finds out Sarah is saying Brian (Aileen’s son played by Paul Mescal) followed her after she left the bar and raped her.
Sarah goes to the police who bring Aileen in for questioning. They inform her Brian says he was with her all night and didn’t go out (they both went to the pub where they both saw Sarah). She immediately confirms this to the officer. Brian is released and she drives him home, kind of asking about what happened but not really, and not really getting a direct answer.
This causes some rifts at their job and at home (Aileen’s daughter Erin is close with Sarah) but it seemed like Aileen thought it would blow over. Sarah presses charges and they have to go to court where after Aileen testifies Brian was with her, the case is thrown out.
Sarah then is slowly ostracized from their small community, she is fired from her job for missing too many shifts, refused service at the bar the attack began at, and ignored by neighbors and friends even while singing for public events, like a blessing of the boats as they go out to sea.
A slow change starts to come over Aileen, especially helped along by Erin who point blank says what she did was wrong, and it appears she starts to stick up for Sarah and distance herself from Brian. When her dad dies and Sarah spits on Brian at the funeral, Aileen tells everyone not to touch her. In the pen penultimate scene Brian and Aileen go out on the water to collect the oysters (or check on them, whatever you need to do to oysters) and she asks him does he feel no guilt for what he did? it doesn’t effect him at all? and he yells that she holds him to this unattainable level of perfection. (Not raping someone seems like a low bar, but sure). She tells him she wants him out of their lives and struggles against the tide to get back to the boat and lays down at the bottom of it, exhausted. A few minutes later Brian also tries to make his way back to the boat but gets caught in a whirlpool and Aileen does not move from the bottom of the boat, she just listens to his cries for help as he drowns.
After some undetermined amount of time we see her going to Sarah’s house, who is leaving. Aileen isn’t asking for forgiveness but kind of sharing that she feels she was wrong. Sarah ignores this and talks about how hard her mother worked to buy this house and how proud she was to leave it to Sarah. And how Sarah assumed that she would live in it all her life and leave it to her children and so on and so on, “until the tide takes it.”
Sarah then gets into her car with all her things and her dog and drives away, the camera staying on her profile and the landscape zipping by for a long time.
I thought this movie was good not great but there were a lot of things I thought it did really well. Perhaps the best thing to me was that they didn’t show any of what happened between Brian and Sarah, but there’s never a question that he did it.
Sometimes movies set up a “he said/she said” thing, then dispel it by showing what happened and who was right. To me this confirms this idea in people’s minds that you can never really know what happened if you weren’t there or there isn’t video. But in this movie, the changes in her behavior and how she’s acting are enough for people to know and I respected that a lot. Her whole demeanor changes, she’s sullen and angry and hurt and hollowed out. Respecting people’s emotions as real was very powerful to me in a way that I don’t think our society has caught up to yet, 99% of women who are public about sexual assault are met with suspicion and skepticism. If they’re visibly upset it’s ‘put on,’ if they’re not it’s proof nothing happened. In this, Sarah wasn’t crying every second after it happened but she changed and it was so clear. I respect the movie a lot for setting it up that way.
They couldn’t have predicted the timing of this movie with the cultural moment Paul Mescal is having but it’s funny to me the timing of this release-that Paul Mescal is like, the heartthrob of the moment and in his newest movie he’s a rapist. To me it just showcases how talented of an actor he is because he’s working against people’s own affinity for him and built up goodwill, AND rape culture which sides with men and he still comes across as an asshole. And he’s an asshole in this completely organic way. I hate the movie villain rapist who is all black and white and it’s so easy to castigate him and other him as “bad.”
I feel like the movie worked hard to show how conflicted the mother was by giving us all the tender moments with him too, him singing with his grandad who is dying, working hard to rebuild himself after a big change, joking with his mom, etc. And he never is cruel to Sarah, or harsh that we see. We don’t see him being harsh or unkind to anyone. Just hardworking and quiet. I obviously don’t know what’s going through someone’s mind as they’re raping someone but I think there’s only a small percentage of people who think what they’re doing is wrong. I think most other people have some justification, or are angry and think in some way what’s going on is deserved.
There is definitely a commentary on how religion acts as a shield for horrible behavior, in the talkback Emily Watson outlined how visible religion is in the movie: meeting in churches for most big events, crosses hanging in every room, bibles and songs, etc. But how there is a “moral vacuum” at the center of the town that lets them ignore this horrible violence that takes place, over and over for generations.
Because something they didn’t talk about but I think is clear is that the only way a woman can excuse this kind of violence against another woman is if she’s been conditioned to her whole life, or when something happened to her she was forced to move on and no one gave her the help and support she needed so she stopped thinking you could ask that of people or the world.
There’s a scene with the grandad and Aileen where she is tending to him and he slaps her in the face. Watson pointed out that he can’t speak but he hits her. How ingrained and deep this type of gendered violence is. Especially in these small towns where the men often do difficult and dangerous work so it’s understood that their lives are hard and that somehow makes it okay for them to be violent to women.
The pacing for me was a little slow and there was a good amount that could have been cut. But I did like how rich and sparse it was at the same time. A lot below the surface, which fit into the fishing town vibe. This balance wasn’t struck exactly right for me, it’s clear there was SO much going on, especially from the talkback and hearing all the work the actors did to create the world and the lives of their characters and I don’t think the movie successfully conveyed all of that.
The ending shot didn’t make sense to me, and I think I wanted a little more maybe? They also had thick accents and were talking low and fast so there were points where I missed a line of dialogue which normally wouldn’t be that big but when everyone only says two things, it feels like a bigger loss.
The mother’s choice is to me the most interesting part, who do you choose to protect and how, and what do you owe to other people if someone you love has harmed them? To me it seemed like she had a knee-jerk reaction then slowly unpacked and found that what she did was wrong and tried to right it and overcorrected? But also how do you enact justice when your entire world isn’t just? Emily Watson said of this character, “she seemed incapable of making a rational decision at any point.”
I think we struggle with that, especially in America where the options are no consequences, or prison. Neither is right.
I think the movie was interesting and mostly good but kind of slow and long and didn’t explore the depths like it could have. I think there’s a fine line between saying too much and not saying enough artistically and this movie was dancing on it but seemed not to find a happy medium and erred unfortunately on the side of not saying enough.
3.5/5 gutted salmon, would not masturbate again.
Oh and I didn’t say anything about the title, but it comes from a line Sarah says, “We’re all God’s creatures in the dark” and I think how she says it it’s meant to be like, we’re all deserving of respect and care, but to me thinking about the religious elements in the movie that seemed to allow and cover up these transgressions I think I’m more inclined to interpret it as how viewing people through the lens of religion, especially if it has already been filtered through a gendered power imbalance, gives the illusion of piety while deep harm is being committed. And how this thing that’s supposed to be an equalizer actually highlights how different certain members of the community are treated within this doctrine. Something like that. I like the title a lot.
I Heard The Book Was Better 