Arracht review – Irish-language murder ballad of famine and injustice

Director Tomas O Suilleabhain's beautifully shot film takes on one man's battle with the British, but without judgment

It's 1847: an Irishman sings a murder ballad about folk hero Colman Sharkey, a peasant who shot dead his landlord. But the story that emerges in this tough atmospheric drama is that the killing did not go down like that. Set during the potato famine, Arracht is in Gaelic with English subtitles (it was Ireland's foreign film Oscar entry) and stars Donall O Healai as Connemara fisherman and farmer Colman, who brews poteen on the side to trade in the village. His character is unsatisfactorily written, to be honest: too saintly by half, he won't touch a drop of his own liquor and there are a few too many scenes of him doting on his wife and his baby son.

The film opens two years before the ballad, at the beginning of the great famine. Colman finds his potatoes rotting in the field, afflicted with potato blight. At the same time his Anglo-Irish landlord (Michael McElhatton) is putting up the rates; Colman decides to pay him a visit to reason with him. Director Tomas O Suilleabhain plays out these scenes brilliantly: rather than make the landlord a cruel, easy-to-hate villain, he's instead monumentally clueless. Colman warns him that half the village will be in their graves by spring. Nonsense, exclaims the landlord, and in a let-them-eat-cake moment explains that a little hardship will be good for the people and will wean them off their dependency on potato crops.