‘It Is In Us All’: SXSW Review

Dir/scr. Antonia Campbell-Hughes. Ireland. 2022. 92 mins

The potent screen presence of Cosmo Jarvis is put to effective use in Antonia Campbell-Hughes’ feature film directing debut. Jarvis, who has previously elevated tortured brute inarticulacy to a fine art, here taps into the kind of hardened, disengaged masculinity which conceals any hint of weakness beneath a veneer of privilege, wealth and immaculate tailoring. Campbell-Hughes, who appears in the film in a supporting role, graduates to feature directing having cut her teeth on short films and having co-written the feature film Cordelia with its director Adrian Shergold. It Is In Us All demonstrates a sure directorial hand when it comes to evoking a sense of place and community, but falters slightly in the writing and the characterisation – for all Jarvis’s intriguingly complex work, the increasingly nihilistic character he plays remains something of a conundrum throughout. 

The score, which drifts through the film like the mountain mist, adds to the film’s moody atmosphere.

Hamish (Jarvis), raised in the image of his businessman father, arrives in Ireland and immediately connects with the birthright inherited from his late mother. It’s a disruptive and unsettling journey of self-discovery. Following a serious car accident, Hamish starts to question his assumptions about himself and his family. An intense connection with a teenage boy who was also involved in the accident is not fully successful as a device, but Hamish’s fierce bond with the land and the home that his mother left is evocatively handled in this atmospheric and handsomely mounted picture which should find further interest on the festival circuit.

Immaculately and expensively groomed, Hamish is ill at ease at the car hire desk at the provincial Irish airport where he finds himself. His manner, a kind of pained poshness, gives way to out and out rudeness when the clerk attempts to engage him in cheery chat to go with his top of the range BMW. He is in Donegal, we learn, to visit the house that his late aunt has left him in her will. “Probably a tear down”, he drawls to a work colleague who is holding the fort back in London. But before he even makes it to the house, and, perhaps not coincidentally, while he is leaving a message for his father, Hamish is involved in a head-on collision.

A bruised and battered Hamish checks himself out of hospital and finally makes it to his aunt’s house – also, it turns out, his mother’s childhood home. And it’s not what he expected. A dignified, upstanding building, proud at the water’s edge, it is austere but not unhomely – plaudits to the production design team for creating a space which moves Hamish to start to explore and question the gaps in his own childhood memories. Likewise the score, which drifts through the film like the mountain mist and adds to the film’s moody atmosphere.

On a whim, Hamish attends the funeral of a teenager who died in the accident; he locks eyes with another boy, Evan (Rhys Mannion), who survived the incident. This triggers a dance between the two – Evan, exploring his sexuality, flirts with the older man; Hamish is drawn to the boy, not as a sexual partner so much as a connection with the land of his mother’s people. Evan shows him the waters where generations of his family fished; dances for him by a campfire; introduces him to a cow. There’s an uneasy quality to this relationship which is presumably deliberate, but the fact that neither character’s motivations to seek each other out seem fully persuasive makes it hard to engage with their scenes together. Their mutual tendency towards self-destruction, however, is grimly convincing. For some men, brushing shoulders with death is the only way to feel – or to stop feeling.