Iona
Iona, written and directed by Scott Graham, after his well-received first film Shell in 2012 which was nominated for a BAFTA Outstanding British Debut along with three awards at the Torino Film Festival, is a classic example of the infamous sophomore slump. It takes longer to watch than it does to read about worked best as an opportunity for Ruth Negga’s empathy-inducing turn as an actress premiered in June at Edinburgh just before playing as the closing night film on San Sebastian’s New Directors slate. An international slow-cinema booking that will no doubt notch up further festival berths sees few likely takers beyond non-English-speaking territories with a lot of patience and a little curiosity about contemporary UK-German co-productions.
Shell was an intimate portrait of a girl on the verge of adolescence and her father living alone together in their own private valley in remote Scotland. The writer-director returns to this territory with Iona, which begins with Negga’s character escaping from her domestic situation by means of her son Billy (Ben Gallagher) beating someone up very violently indeed relatively early on.
Fleeing the attentions of law enforcement that such behaviour tends to draw down upon one’s family, Iona takes Billy also known inexplicably but amusingly as ‘Bull’ back to the island she came from and was named after. Her arrival there reopens various cans of worms most notably those marked Daniel (Douglas Henshall) and Elisabeth (Michelle Duncan), who used to be Iona’s best friend.
Billy swaps sulkily aggressive glances with Elisabeth’s daughter Sarah (Sorcha Groundsell), whose paraplegia requires her to be carried around on people’s shoulders rather than wheeled about in any kind of recognisable wheelchair are these things not allowed on what might loosely be termed ‘an island given over to contemplative religious communities’ in the modern world? Are telephones and medical attention also frowned upon, given that a major character collapses apparently from nowhere and dies very shortly afterwards?
Iona is not a film that invites the viewer to ask ‘why?’ very often. It would much rather one were lulled into a mood of slow-burn, low-energy ponderousness. The actors are fine, the cinematography by Yoliswa von Dallwitz is great, the locations are obviously breathtaking and Graham’s intentions are clearly serious but none of this goes any way at all towards making up for the lack of characters or dialogue; coherence or plausibility; narrative development.
The real life Iona is indeed an island of spiritual pilgrimage which only makes it stranger still that none of these people ever seem to talk about anything other than their own immediate, personal or local circumstances: there’s no music heard or mentioned, no radio played or talked about; nobody watches television or discusses films; reads books or talks politics; plays sports or mentions the wider world at all. Are they really so wrapped up in themselves?
So many things here seem false, forced and empty, with clichéd direction and writing in such abundance that it is soul-deadening meal times are an especially egregious example, always prompting fork-twiddling, food-prodding and morsel-munching. Graham’s habit of extending scenes for thirty or forty seconds beyond their natural end a tic that becomes cumulatively infuriating with editor Florian Nonnenmacher does not help. He creates a static two-dimensional world of glum insufferable characters treating each other with chilly restraint or outright enmity all the way up to a climax which is clearly intended to be harrowingly tragic but which is so heavy-handed in its black irony that it becomes unintentionally comic.
Not that the ending is entirely bleak: there is a very cinematic miracle in the Dreyer/Reygadas tradition just before although this one is explicitly and tastelessly the result of an incestuous relationship. This is Breaking The Waves territory in more ways than one; it’s just unfortunate that Iona ends up much closer to Philipp Groning‘s abortively self-conscious fiction-feature debut The Policeman’s Wife (2013), even if it is thankfully an hour shorter.
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