Penance

Year: 2018

Duration: 84 min

Priest Eoin O'Donnell was unambiguous about the use of violence to force Britain out of Ireland. He influenced a boy Antaine to become a gunman and fight in the 1916 Rising. Fifty years later Antaine arrives in Derry as an experienced killer. This appearance throws Eoin back to the cause of his bloody breakdown of 1916. Fr. Eoin's influence on young Antaine repeats itself in Antaine's dark influence on an impressionable Altar boy in Derry, Feidhlim who is secretly in the IRA.On Antaine's arrival, a dangerous situation becomes worse. The Odd Man Out, noirish streets of Derry create a sense of threat. Eoin no longer believes in violence in the pursuit of political objectives. He tells Antaine that negotiation will achieve more than violence.The film opens with Mass and the redemptive words from Fr Eoin, On the night he was betrayed he took bread...Echoing such classics as John Ford's The Informer. Eoin and the audience can see that the Rising changed Irish politics forever; at the time, amidst the bravery, blood, and rubble, few predicted the death and destruction of the Rising, the Civil War and the northern conflict. Yet, as Eoin walks the long expressionistic streets, watched from lurking dark shadows on his odyssey through the Bogside, a place pregnant with it's own atrocity, he remembers why he was sent to Derry as Penance.At the film's denouement, we understand that Eoin, the one time firebrand, now abhors violence. He believes he must undermine the flawed concept of hero and therefore he must destroy Antaine and by that logic - he must destroy himself. Eoin struggling to reconcile himself with informing on Antaine says a Mass alone in the church. Perhaps his own Last Rights.

Genre: Action   Romance