A compelling new Irish mystery thriller is available to watch from this week

The Irish-language thriller picked up an IFTA award earlier this month.

Set in a small town in the West of Ireland in the 1970s, the movie follows 23-year-old Peggy Casey (Eleanor O’Brien), who runs her family’s pub/bed-and-breakfast.

The business has started to struggle financially, while Peggy's siblings, with whom she runs the bar, wish to leave their small town behind.

Desperately trying to cling to the pub, Peggy is quick to play down reports of human remains being discovered in the area's man-made lake, claiming that it must be a body from the local cemetery that became dislodged.

When this doesn't prove to be the case, and Detective Sergeant Frank Ryan (the great Moe Dunford) is sent up from Dublin to investigate, the young bar owner finds herself drawn into the cop's probe.

Báite has a lot of the elements of a classic mystery thriller, including the following:

1. The discovery of a dead body in suspicious circumstances in an idyllic-seeming small town community
2. A detective from the big city travelling to said small town to uncover the mysteries behind the death, where he faces pushback from the locals
3. Several people, previously seen as pillars of the community, discovered to have had a motive for the killing
4. A time-shuffling screenplay that shifts between the investigation into the murder and the events leading up to it

That said, while Báite is always compelling, it's hard to escape the feeling that it doesn't quite capitalise on these elements.

Written by Sheena Lambert, adapting her own novel The Lake, the movie's focus throughout this mystery is way more on struggling publican Peggy than detective Frank.

It's an unexpected and interesting choice, one that allows Lambert to draw a connection between the modernisation of this small West of Ireland community and the man-made lake that concealed a dead body for decades, with Peggy's business woes.

The latter is perhaps the result of a world rapidly becoming more interconnected, where a small, independently run pub/bed-and-breakfast is not the central hub it once was, now competing with larger chains and bigger cities.

Indeed, there is a melancholy to Báite's depiction of the fading of an old way of life. This feeling is emphasised by Ronan Fox's bright and vivid cinematography, that captures the beauty of Ireland's West in all its glory.

That said, this beauty and these themes do come at the expense of the thrills that one would typically associate with the murder mystery genre.

Yes, the performances are strong (particularly Dunford, O'Brien and Juliette Crosbie), and the revelations are satisfying when they come.

But, there is a curious lack of danger or tension for a movie revolving around a killing, small-town secrets and possible culprits hiding in plain sight. The story often strays from the exciting detective story to the significantly less urgent plot thread of Peggy trying to convince her family not to sell their pub.

As such, those seeking an Irish take on Twin Peaks or True Detective should probably look elsewhere.

There are, though, enough pleasures and handsome craft to be found in Báite to suggest that those who worked on it (including its composers Eimear Noone and Craig Stuart Garfinkle, who picked up an IFTA for the film's music) will go on to bigger and better projects.

Báite in cinemas nationwide from Friday, 6 March.