The Letters

 

Accentuate
The Positive

The Letters
Directed by Robbie Walsh
Ireland 2021

One of the perks/curses of writing a review blog is that sometimes a person involved with a film, usually a director, will trust you enough to give you a preview screener of their work in order to get an honest review. It’s something I’ve started shying away from just recently because, well, I really don’t have a lot of time on my hands but, when writer/director/actor Robbie Walsh approached me on Twitter about his recent feature The Letters, I grudgingly (very grudgingly, I have to admit) accepted. Glad I did because, sometimes when you’re approached out of the blue like this, a cinematic gem comes to light and this is definitely a nicely put together movie about, it turns out, a very troubling real life issue happening now in Ireland.

Okay, so the background of this movie is that, a few years back there was a huge scandal when it turned out thousands of women in Ireland had been given false test results on cervical smears and been told they were fine when, in actual fact, they had the beginnings of cervical cancer and were dying, without being caught early enough to be able to try and prevent this with treatment. This film is a fictional account of three such women, characters who have received false negatives and then found out, later on down the line when it’s too late, that they have advanced cancer symptoms.

The film opens with a curious sequence of a ballerina on stage, cross cut from behind her, stretching the full length of the frame and from a front view. For the front pov, the director puts her in spotlight against a dark backdrop and she takes up the left hand side of the screen. As the shots from the different views switch back and forth, the credits for the movie appear in the right hand side of the screen, complementing the dancing, spotlighted figure. It’s a curious and possible surreal introduction to the film but once you get to the finale of the movie, this scene makes perfect sense in the context of the last five or ten minutes of the story.

Well, I say story but, it’s more of a character study of the three fictional characters (and I suspect some of them may well be fictional composites of real women) and the way they are negatively impacted by their situation. So first up, after the credits, we have the majority of the rest of the movie shot in a moody monotone, looking a little washed out and neutral a lot of the time. I asked the director if that was a deliberate move to not emphasise the blacks and whites and, yeah, it was a way of helping imbue the scenes with the necessary sense of a chaotic nightmare in relation to the bookend scenes of the movie (which is perhaps a hard proposition to explain if you haven’t had the benefit of having seen the film but, trust me, this makes perfect sense too).

And chaos is certainly what we get when we are introduced to the three main characters in little, ten minute sections. So the first character is Sam, played by Mary Murray, a woman struggling as a single mother of five kids and living with crippling debt, which needs repaying to loan sharks. During these sequences and also with other characters when they are feeling under pressure (which is quite a lot), the director utilises hand held camera to give the viewer the sense of being right there in the eye of the storm with them.

This is followed by a character called Cliona, played by the gorgeous Sarah Carroll, who is a worker at the healthcare centre which has given the false positives and who is ultimately scapegoated by her wretched superiors (one of them a minister, played by the director himself in one of the least sympathetic roles in the film) when the calamity comes to light. There’s something muffled about this character, contrasting with the outer glamour projected by her. It takes a while for a certain reveal to come to light but there’s a good reason why she lives her life in such an elabourate, self contained, struggle. She daydreams in colour and this also gives us an introduction, of sorts, as to the pertinence of the way the final scenes of the movie are shot. Actually, the early dream sequence is nicely pulled off as the sound design highlights a clock which is ticking in her office, the sound of which suddenly looms large in the foley during this sequence.

Then we meet Mary, played by Kathleen Warner Yeates, the third of these fictional victims who lives with her mother Bridgette, played by Ann Russell, in order to care for her while she goes through dementia. Like the other two characters, for different reasons, she is living a chaotic and intense life. The director continues to use handheld camera to highlight especially difficult times and also, the other thing he does, is to have a low frequency pulse-like soundtrack cue come in to highlight particular moments of stress with the characters. This works pretty well because the majority of the film is left unscored.

After these three introductions, the film starts crosscutting between the groups of characters to chart their daily horror and things become especially powerful when the film suddenly goes to black screen and a voice over recording of one of the real life women dying from this misdiagnosis is used on the soundtrack for a minute or two. This is followed by an equally grim montage of the three women receiving their letters telling them that, actually, they are in serious trouble. This is quite a devastating few minutes and, you’d be right if you’re thinking the film is not an upbeat, feel good movie as the three main characters cough and splutter their way to three slightly different versions of oblivion (one of the characters taking another character with her). That being said, art doesn’t have to be upbeat, especially with this kind of ‘mirror to society/Loach by way of Bergman’ treatment of what is, after all, a very serious slice of subject matter. And, it has to be said, the film does have many moments of sheer beauty to it, not least of which is the alternative viewpoints of death seen in the closing minutes of the movie. This does, it has to be said, include a parody reconstruction of a famous painting which has become almost something of a cliché in terms of its use throughout cinematic history but, Walsh manages to pull it off quite well here, using it to add to the final product rather than detract from the underlying issues of the piece.

And that’s me just about done with The Letters. I’d like to thank the director, both for allowing me access to it and for making such a wonderful, socially conscious confection. The three lead actresses give absolute powerhouse performances in this and my biggest takeaway from the picture was that this one needs to get more exposure. It’s a well made movie about a very serious and concerning issue happening in Ireland right now and more people need to see this and learn about what’s been going on. If you can get the opportunity to see this one, definitely give it a watch. Nicely played.