Because let us be honest, big screen representations of Ireland on a night out hasn’t always been great…
Two best friends – Laura (Holliday Granger – Cinderella, Patrick Melrose) and Tyler (Alia Shawkat – Arrested Development, Search Party) – live together in a large but messy apartment, and are enjoying their late 20s/early 30s by pretending they’re both still in their late teens/early 20s.
When Laura meets Jim (Fra Fre – Les Miserables), and they begin to fall in love and start to spend more and more time together, Tyler takes an immediate dislike to the new boyfriend and how much he has disrupted their perfect little bubble of playing hard and working hardly at all.
That is the set-up for Animals, based on a book by Emma Jane Unsworth (who adapted her own work here), although the movie transplants the action from Manchester to Dublin.
And while we do get a fantastic representation of the ultimate hype-man (or hyper-woman) BFF that is so close and so intrinsically involved in your life that it becomes toxic, one of the major takeaways from the movie is just how much fun it makes Dublin seem.
Normally, whenever a movie is set in Ireland, it can lean a little too heavily on pokey trad bars (we’re looking at you, PS I Love You), but that isn’t the case here, as the duo hit up all manner of bars, clubs, and secret hot-spots that finally makes the Irish capital look like somewhere you’d want to hang out in.
Admittedly, the fact that Laura and Tyler rely so heavily on their nights out in order to stave off boredom does mean that there is a tinge of desperation about how they approach what is on offer, but that doesn’t take away from the fact that we finally have a big screen representation on par with New York, London, or Berlin.
Animals is in Irish cinemas right now.
Clip via Picturehouse
LISTEN: You Must Be Jokin’ with Aideen McQueen – Faith healers, Coolock craic and Gigging as Gaeilge
