The northside of Cork is not exactly the most filmed location on Earth, but perhaps the greatest achievement of director Brendan Canty and writer Alan O’Gorman’s quietly lovely Christy, a feature-length expansion of their short film of the same name, is that, by the end of it, Cork feels just as cinematically familiar as New York, London, or Paris. This is a film built out of true, infectious love for a place and its people, a poetic tribute to local working-class solidarity that isn’t nearly as cloying or pretentious as that might make it sound.
The eponymous Christy (Danny Power) is a 17-year-old on the cusp of adulthood; quiet and reserved around most people but with a clear, bone-deep terror of the future when he’s on his own. Recently kicked out of a foster home (perhaps related to a brutal fight we only catch glimpses of as locals share the video), he’s living with his impatient older half-brother Shane (Diarmuid Noyes), who is dealing with his own stresses with work and a new baby, and makes it hurtfully clear that this living situation is temporary.
So far, so by-the-numbers social realism/deprived town misery, and Christy’s least effective moments come when it more directly follows that template. But Canty and O’Gorman thankfully have only a limited interest in the darker side of Christy’s story, mostly filling his days with ever-warmer chats and friendships with neighbours young and old (he even ends up good mates with a guy whose first interaction involves Christy lamping him). This cast – made up of a mix of professional and non-professional performers – is one of 2025’s most loveable ensembles, everyone funny and richly realised and melding together perfectly to create an impressively real-feeling community.
‘Quirky’ has become a bit of a dirty word to sum up characters, but Christy’s ensemble fit the description. Not in the (largely pejorative) manic pixie way, but in a much more grounded, endearing manner – all the characters here convince as real people, but they all also have something goofy or ridiculous about them, heightened in the way that you might warmly describe one of your own friends’ traits to someone who’s never met them. With a performance of ever-increasing depth and complexity, Power is a great central anchor for all this, even if he is a bit old to fully convince as 17. Canty and O’Gorman do amusingly acknowledge the age discrepancy, though, making him a kid out of time (he smokes rather than vapes, still has a Facebook account etc) and by having two separate characters mistake Christy for a middle-aged man.
Stylistically, Christy’s status as a low-budget debut is a bit too clear – there’s little in the way of truly memorable visuals here – but as an act of writing, casting, and location scouting, it’s an excellent feature debut for Canty and O’Gorman. They realise that there’s something faintly embarrassing about getting lovingly attached to the place you grew up but that earnestly overcoming that embarrassment is the perfect way to really find a home, even if the most advanced entertainment that home offers is competitively burning old crud you find in a skip.
Jack Blackwell – Film Reviews 