A Date For Mad Mary

Cert: 15A. Now Showing Everyone knows mad Mary. In fact everyone knows a version of all of the characters in Darren Thornton’s wonderful Drogheda-based debut, but it’s not just that familiarity that makes the film work so well. A simple character-based story well told and superbly acted, it’s short, sweet, funny and affecting.

Mary (Seána Kerslake) is getting out of prison just weeks before her best friend Charlene (Charleigh Bailey) gets married. Mary is to be chief bridesmaid and the words she is trying out for her speech act as a voiceover to the film. Her paean to Charlene quickly starts to feel a bit sad as it is evident that the bridesmaid role is a legacy appointment, remnant of an old friendship from which Charlene seems to have moved on. In practice if not name, the charmless Leona (Siobhan Shanahan) has taken on chief bridesmaid duties and the insult is compounded when Mary is not allowed a plus-one to the wedding. Knowing she is her own worst enemy and determined to debunk the notion that she can’t get a date she sets about finding one, and ends up discovering romance in an unexpected place.

Darren and Colin Thornton have done a really nice job adapting Yasmine Akram’s play 10 Dates for Mad Mary, giving it a strong sense of place and time, and creating full, rich, rounded and almost exclusively female characters. There are some obvious set-up scenarios that veer off from the expected and keep it feeling fresh, and the perfectly cast actors — including Tara Lee as Jess — add another layer again. Kerslake is extraordinary lifting it beyond a link between aggression and repressed sexuality. Not to be missed (unless you’re offended by swearing). HHHHH AINE O’CONNOR