Luke: In a new Irish-language film, “secrets can’t stay buried forever, even at the bottom of a lake”

Báite (The Drowned) is the latest in Cine4’s successful run of Irish-language features. A 1970s-set countryside mystery, it’s compelling, cozy and stylish. 

At the start, aerial shots hover on a hot September morning at the tail end of the Irish summer. Waves bob peacefully on the surface of a lake. 

Running from the shore a lone swimmer, a young woman, splashes out into the water. 

From above, she’s surrounded by nothing but blue. Below, there’s only a murky, green blur. 

The camera trails behind her, gliding underwater, then dives away on its own accord, deeper into the lake – revealing ruined houses, fields and gravestones. A village waterlogged and broken down, buried in the deep and in the past.

But secrets can’t stay buried forever, even at the bottom of a lake. 

For Peggy (Eleanor O’Brien), the swimmer from the start of the film, and proprietor of a small-town pub and B&B, the emergence of a body from the lake is bad for the tourist trade.  

Spooked regular guests and new holidaymakers alike leave the village in a hurry. They’ll miss the Big Game. Peggy and her brother have bought a colour TV especially for the occasion.  

Going against the flow of traffic, and sound-tracked by a power ballad. is Detective Sergeant Frank Ryan (Moe Dunford), the closest thing An Garda Síochána have to a street-smart Kojak type. 

Frank certainly looks the part in a jacket and shades. This Dublin detective might as well be from a different universe next to the country constable, Garda O’Dowd (Oisín Mistéil), who’s already in over his head with the investigation. 

Early scenes indicate that O’Dowd has a hard time handling the local church ladies and retired postman, let alone a dead body. 

Tradition vs modernity

Casey’s Pub is at the centre of village life, and director Ruán Magan employs active camera work and editing in the bar room sequences. Peggy and her siblings are busy but not swamped. 

The drama here, as it is throughout the film, is between tradition and modernity. Peggy’s brother in London is looking to sell the pub, something that Peggy is wholeheartedly opposed to. 

The detective’s arrival and stay at the B&B proves a distraction from the worries around the pub’s future, but it opens the Casey family and the entire village to the dredging up of a secret shared across the community. 

It’s an extension of the small town where everyone knows your business to a small town where everyone’s business is the same. 

Sheena Lambert’s script, adapted from her 2015 novel, The Lake, has a breezy quality to it. The actors are allowed a lot of snappy back-and-forth in Irish and in snippets of English.  

With Báite, Cine4 is once again adapting an English-language novel into an Irish-language feature. 

The script leans more melodramatic than it is straight-up. It’s often fairly funny too. A gentler kind of mystery.

Eleanor O’Brien’s central performance is charming. Her trepidation around the visiting detective, anxiety over the future of the family business, affection for the regular customers – it’s all worn on her face. Peggy is often in close-up, and we see so much emotion pass over her face through the course of the film’s deepening mystery. 

Dunford is strong as Frank. He feels like a character apart from the countryfolk, at least at first. But Dunford plays softer and softer as the story goes on. The feeling is that Frank is playing tougher than he is, for this case and his career in the big city. 

The drama from the past gives the filmmakers a chance to explore earlier costuming and styling. Dresses got longer, men wear more and more layers of clothing even when farming. The flashback sequences have a bloomy overexposed quality to them like scenes embossed on toffee tins. Báite is an excellent-looking film, really capturing a sense of place and space. 

Magan and cinematographer Ronan Fox don’t rely on too many drone shots, which tend to be the death of any truly interesting establishing shots. Instead, we get those moody and mysterious overheads from the start of the film, or more interpretive, impressionistic work in dream sequences. 

The procedural stylings of the script, and the impending GAA final that frames the action, mean that the film is never quite meditative in its pacing. But it is measured and tight in the fashion of the most watchable mysteries. 

Late reveals pull at the heartstrings and are sold by committed performances by O’Brien, Dunford and Padraig O'Loinsigh. 

In the film’s closing moments, the camerawork calls back to that first sequence: Peggy gliding through the pub, serving drinks and laughing it up with customers as the match plays in the background. 

Peggy’s on solid ground now, but her movement is as effortless as cutting through the water. The murkiness of the lake was replaced with the warm light of smiles, friendship, family and a future that somehow feels brighter than ever before.

Báite is in cinemas nationwide from Friday 6 March.