’Aontas’ review: Irish-language crime puzzle

Dir: Damian McCann. Northern Ireland, 2025. 91mins

A twisty little back-pedalling Irish-language noir, Aontas features some terrific performances from stalwarts Carrie Crowley (The Quiet Girl) and Brid Brennan (Doineann). As this heist-based narrative snakes around its own timeline, there’s a sense that director and co-writer Damian McCann (with Sarah Gordon) is amusing himself in this one-horse Irish town, executing a cinematic puzzle he has set for himself. Aontas, which means union, is no intellectual exercise, though, with Crowley and Brennan breathing huge life into an expletive-laden screenplay – as gaelige, so it has to borrow some of those bad words.

Even if all the pieces don’t quite fit, the fun is in the game

Aontas comes from the same director and funders who brought Doineann to life – McCann with Gealan, the Irish-language drama initiative from Northern Ireland’s Irish Language Broadcast Fund, BBC Gaelige and the Republic’s TG4. It will look to a similar audience as Doineann (which ended up on BBC2), but may well attract viewers of TV shows Cra and the Scottish An t-Eilean as well. Fans of Nordic noir may well apply. Irish audiences should love it: they’ve a history with Crowley and Brennan and it goes against their type.

Playing out against a misty synth score from Daithi O’Dronai, Aontas works backwards, taking a cue from Christopher Nolan but applying strict genre rules. Clearly economically budgeted and shot — apparently over a little more than two weeks - in the village of Glenarm in Co Antrim, it starts on the street in the aftermath of a raid on the town’s Credit Union, with Brennan’s hard-bitten character Cait wandering dazed and bloodied on the main street. As a body is carried out of the building, McCann starts to work backwards.

Every temporal shift is cued by a kettle boiling or a coffee percolator dripping: the first brings us to a car where Cait meets her estranged and equally stony-faced sister Mairead (the superb Crowley). A bruised Sheila (Eva-Jane Gaffney) appears on the scene. They take us into the bank raid, but only after they’ve put on balaclavas and taken out a gun. It all seems to go badly awry. Then McCann cuts back and back again. There’s a town in economic distress, two funerals, a protest at the local quarry and the town’s two bad guys, who had previously appeared to be innocent bystanders in the Credit Union (Sean T. O’Meallaigh and Marcus Lamb).

Part of the enjoyment of Aontas is that it is a cinematic exercise in how far you can take a classic narrative and get away with it. McCann’s so cheeky: he plucks at the classic Western, chops it up and deals it out backwards, all the while letting the women do the talking. This is a femme noir, even if Crowley, Brennan and Gaffney are far from classic noir femmes. (To say the older leads give unvarnished and committed performances doesn’t quite go far enough: Crowley and Brennan are all-in for no make-up, nothing that would resemble a hairdo, and a wardrobe that stretches to fleeces from the charity shop.)

With a larger budget and more generous shooting time, McCann and DoP Damien Elliott could possibly have done more with the town, the weather and the atmosphere, the one element of noir that Aontas lacks. This is shot straight, in no-frills locations, with a heavy reliance on a clear edit and a focus on the performances in tight close-up. Editor Sorcha Nic Giolla Mhuire tackles the temporal shifts with gusto. Crowley, Brennan and to a lesser extent Gaffney (in a smaller role) are charged with delivering Aontas and turning it into the small-scale crowdpleaser that it is. Even if all the pieces don’t quite fit, the fun is in the game.