Shot for just €16,000 over a brisk 15 days, Mark O’Connor’s Irish drama borrows greatly from crime thrillers that have come before but fails to provide anything fresh to the genre.
★☆☆☆☆
Former army soldier Danny (Luke McQuillan) is homeless and unable to see his child due to past negligence. He meets up with Will (Daniel Fee), a drug-dealing teenager who owes local kingpin Power (Aidan Gillen) money. Danny tries to save Will from that life, but Power won’t let either of them out of his grasp.
The script, co-written by director Mark O’Connor and lead actor Luke McQuillan, is quite awful. There is a first-draft feel to it, with characters only saying exactly what they need to move the story along. There is barely a line of dialogue that actually feels natural, making all of the characters come across as lifeless and wooden. Only Danny gets any semblance of character development, and even then that’s only through the soldier-with-PTSD trope as he hears the screams in his head of the Afghani children he couldn’t save. Will’s backstory needs a lot more work to make the character one you want to root for, while Power, is very one-note. He makes sure you know he’s an evil guy, telling a story about how he broke his dog’s legs and left him on the beach to drown because the dog ran off, but at no point do we see any of this violence firsthand. Despite the eye-roll worthy name, he never has any actually powerful scenes.
Poorly written characters don’t give the actors much of a foundation to create great performances. As a result, they all come across as quite amateur, especially in the case of Fee. There’s little believability to his scenes, which feel either drastically over- or under-done. McQuillan has two emotions in this film: passive boredom or maniac killer. Spending such long periods with this character who appears devoid of any emotion is such a dull affair, especially during a chemistry-less date with social worker Kate (Louise Bourke). It would be easy for him to blame the writer for this if McQuillan wasn’t one of the co-writers himself.
Many aspects of the production do come across as if you are watching a student film. First-time feature cinematographer Ignas Laugalis crafts some fantastic frames but is held back by poor lighting, while handheld camerawork during fight scenes seems to be used to hide the poor fight choreography. The fact that this film was made with a €16,000 budget is commendable, but budget concerns hamper the film dearly. A good portion of the violence is just off-screen, and instead of doing something creative that might set the film apart from any other crime thrillers Amongst The Wolves prefers to just imply and splatter some blood. This would be fine in a short film, but during a violence-focused feature it quickly becomes tiring.
The Verdict
Amongst the Wolves is a crime thriller that doesn’t have an ounce of thrill in it. It’s obvious that Shane Meadows’ low-budget Dead Man’s Shoes is a massive influence here but, Amongst the Wolves lacks the sharp script and emotionally complex characters that made Dead Man’s Shoes such a thrilling watch. The lack of budget is not made up for with creative ideas, resulting in a final product that resists saying anything new.
Words by Jordon Searle
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