Silent Grace

A trashy glue-sniffer with a no-good boyfriend, Aine (Bradley) gets towed into court after being caught out in a stolen car. Apolitical, but with mouth galloping ahead of brain, she blurts out that she's a member of the IRA, landing herself in the Armagh Women's Prison. Her timing couldn't be worse: she arrives in the midst of the 'dirty protests'. Shown to a faeces-smeared cell, Aine vomits up a greeting to her republican roommate. The dirty protests (precursors to the 1980/81 hunger strikes) stand as one of the most unthinkable chapters of the Troubles. Firsthand accounts border on the unreadable. Here, in her first feature, writer/director Murphy must attempt a balance between steely verisimilitude and the dramatic exigencies of historical fiction (not to mention the viewer's gross-out threshold). She employs a naive interloper whose inarticulate disgust gradually shapeshifts into solidarity. Though well acted and concisely plotted, the film is not up to the events it engages - but it's tough to imagine a film that would be. (Inspired by the play Now and at the Hour of Our Death by Trouble and Strife.)