Trouble: Faces in the Crowd of a Century-Old Story

Jonathan Shaw’s Trouble, an Irish Civil War drama through the eyes of a bereaved family, is brimming with an oppressive air that can be hard to sit with. With their father still in an unburied coffin and the brother only recently returned from being a prisoner of war, three siblings reckon with the new, uneasy normal: Free Stater forces patrolling, raiding, shooting, and bombing.

Without it needing to be mentioned, it is obvious that Rose (Emily Kilkenny Roddy) is the eldest. The maternal fulcrum about which the tattered family is arranged, her raison d’etre is to keep them together and safe. Both Owen (Dafhyd Flynn) and Alice (Gráinne Good) are so fundamentally in rebellion against it, their choices seem nearly involuntary.

Owen is an anti-Treaty fighter and Alice is…just the youngest in the family. Where one is embittered and hardened after his time with the enemy, the other is perpetually poised to leap and bound and sneak around for the fun of it. Both are vulnerable in times of war, perpetually present in the background while they go through the mundane and tense passages of their day.

The film sets out to put human faces to a period of national trauma that is both in the past and never laid to rest. Rose, Owen, and Alice are those faces, a makeshift, unstable family that never quite recovered (and never will) from a series of traumas that finally rends them apart from each other and their homeland. The cinematography creates a sense of stark tension using wide shots of sparsely furnished spaces, usually the deserted pub in their home (the seemingly ever-present coffin just beyond), and the warehouse that takes cautious back alleys to get to; the streets feel empty too, but they are never shown. The war is heard through the gunshots and seen in the desolation.

But when it inevitably comes knocking at their doorstep, the wreckage is swift and senseless, the words knocked out of those left standing. The prologue and epilogue, both from perspectives not belonging to the characters, leave this last feeling to settle on the audience: a heavy, unuttered void more intense (and more benevolent) than the gaze of the coffin.

Trouble can at times be difficult to sit through—that is to be expected. What does surprise a little is that the sense of emptiness is more than a little difficult to walk away from.

Watch Trouble Short Film Trailer