Waves crash against the jagged coastline of an Irish fishing village, their rough cadence just one reminder of nature’s abiding power in a place composed of harsh, unyielding elements. The sky is a clouded gray, and the wind cuts sharp and deep enough to hit bone. Such a forbidding clime keeps the community at the center of A24’s “God’s Creatures,” small and close-knit but also superstitious and patriarchal. As is tradition, the men brave frigid waters to fish, while the women work in the factories, with mothers and daughters processing the daily catch brought in by fathers and sons.
READ MORE: Emily Watson & Paul Mescal Are Uncomfortably Close In ‘God’s Creatures’ [Cannes Review]
For Aileen (Emily Watson), who’s made a life for herself in the village, it’s difficult to imagine another way of life, especially once her beloved son Brian (Paul Mescal) returns after a long absence with plans to start over and salvage their family’s struggling oyster farm. But when Aileen’s factory co-worker, Sarah (Aisling Franciosi), accuses Brian of a crime, Aileen instinctively lies to protect him. As this accusation spreads throughout the village, Sarah’s claims are first met with silence and denial, then she’s ostracized completely. Aileen, meanwhile, is forced to question how well she knows her son and the extent of her complicity within a culture of repression and violence.
Directed by Anna Rose Holmer and Saela Davis, from a script by Shane Crowley, this A24-produced morality play (in theaters and on VOD Friday) relies upon performance and atmosphere to evoke the gathering tempest of Aileen’s interior life amid the blustery, rainswept conditions of her world. In a turn reminiscent of her breakthrough work in “Breaking the Waves,” Watson captures the slow widening of a chasm within Aileen, between a mother’s devotion and a woman’s weary conscience. Mescal, meanwhile, captures emotional inhibition with a more sinister touch than he did in the breakout series “Normal People,” and Franciosi builds upon her work in “The Nightingale” with another performance of profound strength and sorrow.
The ambiance of “God’s Creatures” is perhaps even more haunting, with often shiver-inducing sensory details of life in the village emphasized through the film’s rhythmic combination of direction, editing, and sound design. At the processing plant, heavy machinery hums and grinds alongside the clattering of oyster shells, the blood-stained factory floor seeming to darken with time. Elsewhere, sea shanties are carried like echoes on the wind, sometimes building until they reach a gale-force intensity of their own.
Both Holmer and Davis describe their artistic approach as highly collaborative and intuitive, a sustained meeting of minds and interplay of abilities that fuels the experiential quality of their cinematic language and continuity. Though “God’s Creatures” marks their debut as a directing team, they’ve worked together on multiple short- and feature-length projects this past decade. The pair’s most high-profile collaboration, “The Fits,” was developed for and through Venice’s Biennale College – Cinema Lab, later playing the festival and premiering stateside at the Sundance Film Festival. Another highly immersive psychological portrait — this one focused on an 11-year-old (Royalty Hightower) who joins a young girls’ dance troupe, only for others on the team to experience mysterious spasms — “The Fits” was co-written by Holmer, Davis, and producer Lisa Kjerulff; Holmer directed, while Davis edited.
From A24’s New York offices the day before introducing a screening of “The American Friend,” which they programmed for the American Cinematheque, Davis and Holmer spoke about the tidal rhythms of their film, its alchemical development process, and sound design as a tool for unlocking the audience’s subconscious.
This interview has been edited and condensed. Holmer and Davis responded jointly to its last question, asked as an email follow-up.
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The two of you have a longstanding creative collaboration, which has taken various forms across projects such as “The Fits.” Given that history, I was curious what made “God’s Creatures” the right first feature for you to co-direct.
Saela Davis: As you say, we’ve both had different trajectories, but we’ve partnered on many projects together. At the time that “God’s Creatures” came to us, we were writing together and moving toward this path of becoming a directing team. This script came along and was asking questions we had been both asking ourselves for quite some time — and also examining within the work that we were writing, personally. That was one of the first things we connected to: the questions it was asking.
Anna Rose Holmer: We had said the phrase “directing team” to ourselves long before [“God’s Creatures” materialized.] We had been writing together at that time, after “The Fits,” and we knew that was us moving toward being a directing team. We wanted to make something that felt really profound and personal to both of us in that debut work as a team. And this just was poetic and patient and surprising. It felt right. You have to have some sort of internal meter or instinct that you trust. We sat side-by-side and read what Shane and Fodhla had sent to us, and immediately we were like, “This is it. This is where we can go.”
Davis: The thing that solidified it was meeting our producer, Fodhla Cronin O’Reilly. We obviously are motivated by this spirit of collaboration. And with your creative collaborators, you really have to have a strong connection. We met Fodla and spent an entire day with her, talking about the script, about the films that we want to make and the films that inspire us. That connection solidified into us wanting to work together to make this film and bring it to life.
Unlike “The Fits,” which you both co-wrote with Lisa Kjerulff, “God’s Creatures” was written by Shane Crowley. What do you remember of your initial reaction to the script, and what was it like to develop your own film from someone else’s story?
Holmer: We came onto this project in 2018, and we worked really closely with Shane and Fodhla for two and a half years. There’s a difference to coming in and directing in that space, rather than doing the page work, but the process was incredibly rewarding. And the beautiful thing about it was that Shane has such specificity and authenticity of place, and such a voice. It was a true alchemy of forces. “God’s Creatures” is not something that any of us four could have made solo. There was something really beautiful about us coming together.
Davis: And the funny thing is that I don’t think it was very different for us. It was just that two other people joined the team; we became a team of four in making this film. We developed it with Shane and Fodhla for two and a half years. And they were just so open to any ideas that we had, and they knew that this collaboration would only strengthen the final film. We built it together. I like to say that it was like a garden, and we were all putting in our own seeds, and now we’ve grown something really beautiful. It very closely resembled our own intimate process.
Holmer: It’s actually the script we’ve spent the most time on, ever. By the time we arrived for pre-production, we knew the script deeply. “The Fits” was such a fast process, from first draft to world premiere in under a year. It was a blitz. This was studied, patient, and careful. There was that quality of letting it brew in the way that it needed to. But it didn’t feel different. It felt very natural.
