We breach the water gasping for air at the start of God’s Creatures. A distant dog barks, alerted to our intrusion. Nature sounds the alarm.
After this flooded prologue, Saela Davis and Anna Rose Holmer’s film introduces us to the women of the fishery on a small Irish island. More than friends and coworkers, these women are comrades, working together to help each other get by. What happens to one affects them all.
When Aileen O’Hara’s (Emily Watson) estranged son Brian (Paul Mescal) returns home from feckin’ off to Australia like, the tides begin to change. Things are tense at home from the start. To get Brian back on his feet, Aileen has to steal resources from her job, resources he only squanders. Brian starts poaching. Unaccustomed to life on the island, he nearly gets swept away by the demands of the fishing trade. Still, he’s hopeful his luck will change by rekindling things with his teenage crush Sarah (Aisling Franciosi), who works with his mom at the factory.
One morning after a night out at the pub, Sarah comes into work looking distraught. She’s shrunken into herself, barely composed. As she takes her usual place at the far end of the factory floor, the camera creeps past the other ladies going about their day. Inching closer, sounds of hyperventilation change the rhythm of Danny Bensi and Saunder Jurriaans’ otherwise languid score. An interruption—something’s not right. A coworker breaks Aileen’s scrutiny to inform her that she’s found a fungus in the oysters she’s sorting. Soon other women confirm that they also detect it in their crops. They will need to destroy their yield and put a moratorium on harvesting oysters until the fungus has cleared, effectively bringing the island economy to a standstill. Like the dog in the prologue, the dying oysters portend an intrusion surfacing.
As the island reels from the loss of income, Sarah files rape charges against Brian. Davis and Holmer haven’t shown us anything from that night, just Sarah’s sudden change and her shudder at Aileen’s touch. Most people seem inclined to think Brian did it, but Aileen just got her son back. She doesn’t want to believe he would commit such a violation, nor risk losing him again. Though the judge dismisses the case for lack of evidence, a riptide of events force Aileen to reconsider the depths of her convictions.
It’s no coincidence that the appearance of the fungus coincides with our suspicion that something violent happened to Sarah. The water and the village are twin worlds, ecosystems with a delicate equilibrium. The oysters and the women have a common problem and a similar solution. Both have been violated and require hard choices to correct the intrusion.
It may be a bit on-the-pearl to link oysters and women. Still, in doing so, Davis, Holmer and screenwriter Shane Crowley create a bold ecofeminist film that traces the currents of nature, economics and gender. Rape becomes a parasitic fungus that eats away at the social and financial lives of those afflicted. Both cause a loss of income and a vacuum of social upheaval. The accusations divide the community, even the O’Hara household. Sarah loses her job after too many absences, leaving the factory short-staffed and changing her irrevocably. Because of the rape and the death of the oysters, the tiny community will never be the same.
Other films this year have tackled sexual violence with similar themes. She Said about breaking the Harvey Weinstein scandal also made sure to underscore the ways speaking out against sexual violence often leads to economic losses for the victims, many of them pushed from jobs and shut out of their industries. Sarah Polley’s Women Talking drives home the damage done to an agricultural community, especially one in which women are a central component of the workforce.
God’s Creatures elegantly brings all those streams together. The poetic parallels between Sarah and the oysters churn over and over, highlighting the mutual violation between the creatures in the sea and the creatures on the land. The sea mirrors the island. What affects one oyster affects them all. By netting nature metaphors and economic downturn into a delicate social drama, Davis and Holmer plunge us into the deep communal despair sexual violence creates. It’s a spiritual as well as economic depression. The key to weathering the storm is sticking together as a community.
But unlike the other films this year, God’s Creatures dares to suggest that breaks from the system are the only effective treatment against repeat offenses. It’s about the harsh measures individuals must take to protect the delicate balance of their ecology. By following the mutual currents of their metaphors, Davis, Holmer and Crowley take us away from shallow storytelling and ask us to swim in more radical depths.
B.L. Panther is a culture writer, scholar and Pisces from Northern Illinois. B! writes for outlets such as Honey Literary Journal and The Spool, where they’re also the cohost of The Meh-thod Podcast discussing great actors in less-than-great films. A champion hermit, they enjoy reading, the indoors, afternoon naps and doing nothing at all.