{"id":265405,"date":"2025-11-06T11:21:14","date_gmt":"2025-11-06T11:21:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/265405\/"},"modified":"2025-11-06T11:21:14","modified_gmt":"2025-11-06T11:21:14","slug":"a-sincere-irish-christmas-movie-about-home-and-the-absence-of-it-the-irish-times","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/265405\/","title":{"rendered":"A sincere Irish Christmas movie about home and the absence of it \u2013 The Irish Times"},"content":{"rendered":"

Abode <\/p>\n

\ue9d9 \ue9d9 \ue9d9 \ue9d7 \ue9d7 <\/p>\n

Director: Liam O Mochain<\/p>\n

Cert: 15A<\/p>\n

Starring: Liam O Mochain, Mary Murray, Stephen Jones, Rose Henderson, Donncha Crowley, Marion O\u2019Dwyer, Mary McEvoy, Brendan Conroy, Gail Brady<\/p>\n

Running Time: 1 hr 21 mins<\/p>\n

Liam O Mochain has been bravely getting solid, entertaining features into cinemas since before the Irish film industry\u2019s current renaissance had reached even embryonic visibility. <\/p>\n

In recent years he has happened upon the anthology as a way of telling a spectrum of related stories. The writer-director here follows up Lost & Found<\/a>, his 2017 collection set around a railway station, with a bundle concerning homes<\/a> and homelessness<\/a>. <\/p>\n

The best episodes have an unpretentious warmth that jollies you happily to welcome destinations. If you don\u2019t care for one, another will be along in a moment.<\/p>\n

There is a sense of repertory theatre about it all. Actors appear in more than one episode \u2013 including the director, with various beards and haircuts \u2013 but each is its own discrete yarn.<\/p>\n

O Mochain and his team have wisely held back release until the perfect time for a flick that has a bit to do with the Yuletide. The most heart-warming of the stories has a group of homeless people making a Christmas<\/a> for themselves in an empty restaurant.<\/p>\n

The story is obviously alert to the tragedies of being unhoused, but, as Christmas stories should, it remains open to reassuring sentimentality. The script gets that sometimes those problems \u2013 grief, loneliness \u2013 are connected to those aired around seasonal tables in even the most lavish houses.<\/p>\n

Another story dares to defy preposterous taboos about exploring the sex lives of older couples. Elsewhere we meet a woman facing up to an encounter with the son she has never met. The most unlikely chapter maybe overreaches with a tale of a monstrous high-tech oven that looks to have escaped from an episode of Charlie Brooker\u2019s Black Mirror.<\/p>\n

\u201cI wanted to make a film about home and what it means to different people,\u201d O Mochain, whose family was homeless for the first year and half of his life, has said, and the film cannot be faulted for variety or sincerity.<\/p>\n

The tight budget does show through here and there, but experienced actors such as Brendan Conroy, Mary Murray and Marion O\u2019Dwyer keep it aloft. There is a sense of an ongoing conversation between each of the narratively distinct \u2013 but thematically overlapping \u2013 stories in a humane film that makes the best of limited resources.<\/p>\n

In cinemas from Friday, November 7th <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Abode \ue9d9 \ue9d9 \ue9d9 \ue9d7 \ue9d7 Director: Liam O Mochain Cert: 15A Starring: Liam O Mochain, Mary Murray,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":265406,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[122454,49,48,75,337],"class_list":{"0":"post-265405","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-movies","8":"tag-abode-review","9":"tag-ca","10":"tag-canada","11":"tag-entertainment","12":"tag-movies"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/265405","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=265405"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/265405\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/265406"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=265405"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=265405"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=265405"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}