> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://www.dublininquirer.com/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # Luke: “Magilligan” is an uneasy prison documentary, with no sign of escape - URL: https://www.dublininquirer.com/luke-magilligan-is-an-uneasy-prison-documentary-with-no-sign-of-escape/ - Published: 2026-09-24T23:54:24.000Z - Updated: 2026-09-24T23:54:24.000Z - Description: Ross McClean’s new documentary is playing on Saturday as part of the Irish Film Institute’s Documentary Festival 2026. - Author: Luke Maxwell - Tags: film, prisons, Culture Desk Inside the walls of HM Prison Magilligan, inmates crowd together in a cell smoking and talking about the outside. What’s going on with Tommy? He’s dead 10 years. Didn’t he go with your ex Zoe? Did she die, too? Did she? They hadn’t heard, maybe she did, maybe she didn’t. The walls and barbed wire around the prison separate these people from the world they once knew. But it’s clear from their talk that that world is rapidly fading away too. One of the prisoners, Ryan, younger than the others, is on the periphery of the conversation. The future he’s hearing about filled up with half-remembered faces, death and regret isn’t his reality, yet. He’s the central figure in Ross McClean’s *Magilligan*, a documentary that follows Ryan inside and outside of prison, through rehabilitation and probation. This film shows the limits and possibilities that a prisoner like Ryan encounters in trying to rebuild a life after serving time. ## “Don’t think about it” When we join Ryan, he has not lost touch with the outside world to the same degree as the veteran prisoners he shares cigarettes and cups of tea with. He has a little time left on his sentence. He has family that want him back in their lives. And he has the prison farm, where he tends to sheep and lambs as part of a rehabilitation programme. Ryan is in his mid-twenties. He is serving the custodial part of a sentence for an assault that caused grievous bodily harm to another man. The specifics of the case are not dealt with directly in the film. McClean gestures at it through shots of newspaper clippings that are shown as fragments. But in a to-camera interview McClean, tries to probe Ryan on his feelings about [the crime](https://www.irishtimes.com/news/crime-and-law/man-who-beat-autistic-student-and-left-him-for-dead-sentenced-1.2443587?ref=dublininquirer.com). The director asks few questions. He keeps focus on Ryan’s face and lets him talk and think through his feelings. “Don’t think about it, don’t talk about it, don’t know anything about it,” Ryan says. But this brushing-off is hollow sentiment, as he admits that even when not thinking about his actions, he still carries them with him and knows what he did. McClean’s approach and the omission of the specifics of the case are to the film’s benefit. Ryan is not a sympathetic character, though we do have sympathy for him. ## Violence Frequently his monologues speak to Ryan’s violent youth and upbringing. There is a fatalistic tone to his recollections of family, prison, and family imprisoned. Prison, Ryan says, is in his DNA. His grandfather, father and uncle had all served time. “I learnt to walk in a prison yard,” he says. Violence was at the centre of Ryan’s family life too. A home movie transferred from blurry videotape shows a family scene at Christmas time. An older family member, a brother or cousin, is covering his face “He doesn’t want the police to know he’s here,” jokes a voice from off-screen. Standing in a doorway is Ryan’s father. Scowling with intensity. The video pauses and zooms in until the pixels turn to a sort of mosaic of Ryan’s father’s face. Even through the blurry noise of the image the aura of anger and violence resonates. In a later sequence, Ryan talks about his youth playing the flute in loyalist marching bands. His father kept the boys in time by whacking them on the legs with a stick. He recalls “battering” another father and son at a march with his father. That day his father told him “You’re going to seriously hurt someone someday”, as he recalls it. Violence is a constant in Ryan’s life. Even in rehabilitation with the sheep, he struggles with the animals. McClean shoots these scenes extremely close. Ryan moving and wrestling a sheep as it bucks and fights him. Shouts from inside the prison hurl abuse at the amateur-shepherd. “Fucking sheep wanker”. “Sheep bastard”. ## What now It’s the same as the hostility that follows Ryan on the outside when he returns home on probation. Drivers beep and shout at him constantly. McClean understands, or comes to understand, that the world itself is a prison for Ryan. We see Ryan wandering the streets, and pouring his guts out to his mother on the phone. A four-day disappearance costs him his probation. Back in prison, Ryan is more reserved and distant with the camera than before. It’s frustrating to watch, there’s no redemption arc here, but these real stories of real people, real pasts, are never as neat as in the movies. At one point McClean, who shot the film himself, lets the prisoners in Magilligan hold the camera and shoot what they like. “I like how the hallway looks,” one of them says, zooming and zooming into an endless hallway of cell doors and reinforced glass. That’s the world, hemmed in and fenced in. So much of the film frames itself with bars and tiny windows. For Ryan even his escape, the small field and flock, is bordered by concrete and barbed wire. The escape is no escape, not on its own, not from violence or the shouts from the other inmates. In the tiny enclosure among the sheep, the shepherd is penned in too. The most prominent feeling at the end of *Magilligan* was hopelessness for Ryan in particular. McClean has achieved great things with this film. Ryan is a hard subject but the film isn’t hard to recommend as a probing portrait of prison life, inside and outside of prison. It’s not a neat narrative either, leaving room for interpretation. There’s space for hope in a universal if not a specific sense. Rehabilitation may be possible, but it’s not as simple as bottle-feeding a lamb. The final shots are of green fields and fences, confining Ryan to a different sort of life, if he wants it. Based on what we’ve seen up to this point nothing seems certain. *Magilligan is* [*playing Saturday*](https://ifi.ie/films/doc-fest-26-magilligan-2?ref=dublininquirer.com) *as part of the Irish Film Institute’s (IFI’s) Documentary Festival 2026\. The full programme for the festival is* [*here*](https://ifi.ie/docfest?ref=dublininquirer.com)*.*