City Cinema: Horseshoe

Drama/Comedy. 14A, coarse language, violence, mature themes.
Dir: Edwin Mullane/Adam O’Keeffe, Ireland, 2025, 88 min.
Carolyn Bracken, John Connors, Lalor Roddy.
Winner, Best Irish First Feature at the Galway Film Fleadh.
Sponsored by the Benevolent Irish Society.

“The combustible set-up is familiar: a traumatised family, a contested inheritance and a house rattling with difficult history. But Horseshoe reinvents this dog-eared premise with dark humour and a keen understanding of the emotional complexities underpinning huge family rows. Jer and Evan have never left the outsize rural home that father Colm ruled with an iron fist. They are a study in arrested development… Meanwhile… Cass is close to losing her house; Niall, a yoga practitioner, is being drained financially and psychologically by a custody battle. Tension surges as soon as they’re all in the same room – and only escalates when a solicitor announces they have 24 hours to unanimously decide how to settle the estate or risk everything going to the State. The returnees are desperate to sell the house; the remainers will do anything to keep their home. Old alliances and grudges swiftly resurface. O’Keeffe’s well-observed script sketches a family who communicate through barbs, sullen silences and unwanted cups of tea… The film’s locations, notably the characterful, lonely house on the Sligo-Donegal border, are framed with grey, rough-hewn beauty… Horseshoe was a deserving winner of the award for best Irish first feature at Galway Film Fleadh and a fine opening gambit for the film-making duo.” —Tara Brady, The Irish Times