Luke: New film The Three Urns is “puzzling, haphazard, funny ha-ha, funny peculiar, and messy”

At first glance, The Three Urns appears to be just another genial road trip through Ireland.  

The poster shows beaches and mountains with green fields, a lost man returning to his homeland, and the oh-so-typical flyover of the Irish coast opens the film. 

These are gestures at tried-and-tested fare. But soon, and very soon, these expectations are upended.

The Three Urns is meandering, strange, perplexing, slow, shaggy, leisurely, confounding, puzzling, haphazard, funny ha-ha, funny peculiar, and messy. These – all together – are good qualities.

A man, “The Man” (Ciarán Hinds) in the film’s credits, travels to Ireland to scatter his wife’s ashes and visit the significant spots from their life together. In slow pursuit is a mysterious French woman (Olga Kurylenko). 

In the way of both of their destinies are kilometres of higgledy-piggledy roads, bureaucracy and many encounters with strangers.

Second outing

The Three Urns reunites co-directors John-Paul Davidson and Stephen Warbeck with Ciarán Hinds following their successful collaboration on 2020’s The Man in the Hat. 

That film, a Sunday-drive road movie set in France, is something of a template for this Man’s adventures through Ireland. 

Although, The Three Urns is a talkier film than The Man in the Hat, where Hinds took on a Tati-esque physical role. Think Les Vacances de Monsieur Hinds, and you’re not far off the mark.

The films are distinct, but the same spirit is alive in both of them.

What can go wrong, will go wrong

We don’t know much about The Man, but in the first scene he accidentally drops his smartphone in the sea before getting off the ferry. This is the first in a long series of gaffes and goofs that take place throughout his journey. 

The misfortune is frequent but mild and is smile-inducing if not laugh-worthy. Anything that can go wrong for The Man will go wrong. The Man takes it all in stride, sometimes moaning about the situation but always keeping on keeping on. 

Setback after setback come at The Man. The car he’s traveling in has its wheels stolen, and when he goes to retrieve the car with a tow truck he finds the car has been stolen too. 

This scene features a great reaction shot. The Man is not typically animated, and Hinds exclaiming in disbelief, “They’ve stolen the bloody car!” got a blurt of laughter out of me.

For some portion of the film he drives an old Morrison-Electricar milkfloat, a comical vehicle in form and function. Later, the float is converted to solar power and looks like a mechanical housefly puttering along the country roads. 

Incidentally, the one bit of consistent luck The Man has is the weather, as his car doesn’t run out of juice. 

Another hitch later in the film sees the milkfloat undergo further retrofitting, and soon, The Man is using it as a horse and cart. 

Face each day with curiosity

Seeing The Man ride stagecoach really sells Hinds’ moviestar quality even in a lowkey role. He’s got the look of a classic Spaghetti Western antihero, squinting through the screen as his face fills the frame. 

The sight gags are less pronounced than they were in the trio’s earlier collaboration but Davidson and Warbeck know when to hang a camera on something strange. 

Hinds’ performance is subtle but clearly comedic. There’s a very shaggy make-it-up-as-you-go-along quality to the dialogue and narrative that makes each successive episode, strange as they may be, feel natural. 

The scenes where he hums along to the last couple of bars of a song on the radio really sell the joy in the mundane that The Three Urns trades in.

As the man goes about his journey he meets a disgraced priest, a fellow urn carrier with his own story to tell, mischievous folk singers, a member of the Choctaw tribe traveling to Ireland for a commemoration ceremony, and many others. 

None of these encounters change The Man. He’s had his arc. We are witnessing moments in time, episodes in people’s lives. 

The Man has done his growing and learning and what life has taught him is to face each day with curiosity.

The Three Urns’ narrative barely holds together. Only the thinnest of threads links episodes together. The woman pursuing The Man is equally hapless, and their chase is deliberately lackluster.

Struggle between head and heart

So many of the decisions that went into the presentation, structure and tone of The Three Urns seem baffling from moment to moment. But Davidson and Warbeck have a grand vision. 

We see a struggle between the head and the heart throughout. I’m not sure which of the co-directors is the head and which is the heart but the constant tension in the film’s tone and style is riveting. 

Warbeck also serves as the film’s composer and foregrounds music through a continuous use of diegetic scoring. 

So often, the camera will pan away from The Man to another character singing or playing an instrument, then we’ll be in a different mode for a minute or two. These sequences are always capped with a classic musical style crane shot taking in some majestic vista. 

Like so many aspects of The Three Urns it feels out of place at first, incongruous to the film as a whole. But then, the whole film is like this: a swirling soup of influences and incidents. 

The head struggles to make sense of it all, but the heart beats along with every haphazard second of it.

The Three Urns is in cinemas nationwide from 17 April.