Effi o Blaenau

What do you get if you cross a Greek tragedy with stark British social realism? Effi O Blaenau. In this ferocious Welsh-language film, Marc Evans has adapted Gary Owen’s acclaimed one-woman play Iphigenia in Splott, which transforms the doomed Iphigenia into a working-class Welsh woman. Here, the battle ground is not Troy, but the underfunded NHS.

Scrappy Effi (Leisa Gwenllian) spends her days in a pink fluffy dressing gown eating Pot Noodles on the sofa with her housemate and chugging vodka from a mug. Her nights are spent drinking herself into oblivion at the local clubs of Llandudno. A chance encounter with an injured soldier shows Effi a glimmer of a better future. But what starts off as a giddy romance becomes a brutal tale of ghosting, which soon turns into something even worse – a maternity care horror story that lays bare the ravages of austerity.   

In Evans’s version of this story the Cardiff neighbourhood setting is transplanted for something far bleaker: Blaenau Ffestiniog, a former slate mining town in the heart of Eyri (Snowdonia), where there are no jobs and nothing for young people to do. Effi’s nan (Carys Gwilym) works nights at the fish and chip shop, while Effi’s neighbour (Mared Llywelyn), a mother of three, struggles to put food on the table. Blaenau looks impossibly desolate on screen, thanks to cinematographer Eira Wyn Jones’ endless shots of mountains shrouded by mist, rows of identical grey pebbledash houses, washed out hills, fields and lakes, and the relentlessly pelting rain and snow. 

The tight 90-minute story keeps you on the edge of your seat

Despite her sharp-tongued brashness, it’s hard not to root for Effi as she embarks on her hero’s journey. Gwenllian is a formidable actor who can deftly transform from drunk and lairy in the club, to glimmering and lovesick in the pale morning light; from inconsolable, crying on the floor, to marching out of her solicitor’s office, defiant. 

And the tight 90-minute story keeps you on the edge of your seat, not only because of Effi’s unpredictable character, but for real tear-out-your-hair moments of drama. The true pain lies in the impossible choices and sacrifices the women have to make – between an abortion or being an unemployed single mother; between staying with your indignant patients, or accompanying a vulnerable young pregnant woman on a treacherous ambulance journey; between suing a hospital for negligence in an irreparable system, or walking away. The unfairness of it all will have you screaming at your screen. 

It might make you uncomfortable, and there’s little in the way of light relief, but this is the kind of film that austerity Britain needs – infuriating, devastating and impossible not to be moved by. 

In UK and Ireland cinemas Fri Jun 19.