Disco Pigs
(2001)
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Pig and Runt were born moments apart, in the same hospital, and, except for blood, are twins. They grow up together and have equal appetites for recklessness and destruction. Just before their seventeenth birthdays Pig's behaviour threatens the private world they have spent a lifetime building. Their special relationship is stretched to breaking point and the survival of one of them depends upon which one can break free... |
With director Kirsten Sheridan being the daughter of My Left Foot director Jim Sheridan, you would expect some pedigree from this twisted rite-of-passage tale, but the result is an overwrought drama that doesn't quite come up with the goods. Inseparable since birth, next-door neighbours and wilful outsiders Cillian Murphy and Elaine Cassidy have grown up together as though they were twins — even having their own special language. But when they are prised apart on their 17th birthday, all hell breaks loose. Unfortunately, that is the moment Sheridan's already precarious feature debut collapses into a mêlée of sickening violence that lacks both the power and the poignancy of Neil Jordan's similarly themed The Butcher Boy. Both the principals are fine, with Murphy in particular suggesting the raw pain of teenage trauma via his baby-talk babble. But Enda Walsh's adaptation of her own play is too verbose and that only exposes Sheridan's inability to find the romanticism in the piece.