Aidan Gillen excels as a man stepping into his dead brother's shoes in this eerie, Singapore-set drama
The first feature film from writer/ director team Christine Molloy and Joe Lawlor was Helen, a breathtaking examination of fluid identity about a young woman playing a missing girl in a police reconstruction. There are clear comparisons with this eerie second feature, in which Aidan Gillen's listless Gerry Devine travels to Singapore in the wake of his brother's death, and winds up wearing his clothes, living in his house, and perhaps rekindling his watery ghost. The dreamy visuals of Ole Birkeland's slowly panning cameras are once again to the fore, conjuring a world of tactile significance in which meaning hovers constantly at the edge of the frame. Gillen is great, his laconic stance thrown off-balance by tragedy, his face apparently struggling to find itself, uncertain of its own expression. Stephen McKeon's score is spine-tingling too, a series of aching suspensions heavy laden with loss. That the whole should not quite add up to the sum of its parts is no great tragedy; there is enough magic in these meanderings to carry us over the flaws.
Source: http://www.theguardian.com/film/2013/sep/29/mister-john-review-aidan-gillen
analysis and opinion Anand Patwardhan Anastasia Blue ancient
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