Douglas Henshall and his brothers go to pieces after the death of their widowed mother. Their invalid sister copes best, but she's forgotten in their dysfunctional display of ill-defined grief. Henshall's stabbed in a pub brawl, kid brother Stephen McCole goes looking for the assailant while the eldest, Gary Lewis, keeps an all-night vigil over mam's casket in the church. The church roof blows off in a gale. It's that kind of an evening. Peter Mullan's dazzling directorial debut is a corrosive emotional drama that's blisteringly funny and achingly sad all at the same time. The performances are fantastic and Henshall hits the highest point of tragi-comedy when he breaks down in front of his bemused workmates: "I want me mammy..." he blubbers, before collapsing into the Clyde. Mullan is the actor from Ken Loach's drama My Name Is Joe, a typically downbeat work that aims to be lifelike. Orphans is much the better film, vibrant and honest as, for all its bizarre bluster, it reaches a kind of raw emotional truth lacking in Loach's staid pictures.
Review of Orphans
