Forget Mid-western tumbleweed or the dusty horizons of southern Italy. DARKNESS ON THE EDGE OF TOWN trucks the violent western to the green fields of Ireland, grey skies and drizzle aplenty. Blood contrasts better on grass, anyway.

Patrick Ryan’s debut feature follows the close friendship of Cleo (Emma Eliza Regan) and Robin (Emma Willis). Cleo’s sister has been murdered, her throat slit in a public toilet, and Cleo decides to carve up her own form of justice, taking her rifle skills to those she believes responsible. The target is never clear, however, and the killer is closer to hand than she suspects.

DARKNESS ON THE EDGE OF TOWN roams restlessly across the fertile texts of the Leone western. Cynical hard-men are switched for cynical hard-women, but the genre-standard wide-angle lense and scenery chewing sidle along as lonesome as ever – the soundtrack, a mix of sparse electronic music and reverberating guitars, even has atmospheric bells periodically inserted. Amid the palette of inescapable still shots, characters are left alone or in pairs. Never crowded, individuals are abandoned, dwarfed and desolate in the gloom of the rural landscape.

Little wonder growing up lead to shoot ‘em ups …

On the inside, they are torn figures. Cleo, fitting the genre, is laconic. Beneath her silences, however, is a youth-in-revolt violence that drills across all of DARKNESS’s young protagonists. Robin, we are told, “kicked like death” in the womb and “had a knife in every pocket” at ten. Little wonder that growing up led to shoot ‘em ups … and pushing her mother down the stairs. The adult characters, in contrast, appear lost within the family relations which they are perturbed to have fostered. Their grey, drab houses seem as tired as they are, ailing from the burden of a fractured and abandoned local society.

If Patrick Ryan’s film suffers anywhere, it is in the script. The dialogue appears naïve, too often undermining the actor’s hard stoicism; and there is need for a little more guile in the plot. However, as an atmospheric, brooding genre piece DARKNESS ON THE EDGE OF TOWN creates an oppressive society where the bloodshed of characters all too often distanced from violence becomes real, powerful and painful; and in doing so makes a very engrossing 90 minutes.

DARKNESS ON THE EDGE OF TOWN screens on 9 September at 21.00 at the Light Cinema

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