Eion Macken’s adaptation of Rob Doyle’s 2014 novel is basically a coming-of-age tale, but the moral is a banal one, and cloaking its vacuousness in an excess of style-for-style’s-sake only accentuates its emptiness. The protagonist is Matthew Connolly (Dean-Charles Chapman), who, as he graduates from a posh Dublin prep school “to become a man,” is congratulated by his Headmaster (Ralph Ineson) with the admonition to remember that the choices he makes will define him.
He immediately makes a bad one, joining with his two best pals, volatile Kearney (Finn Cole), and drugged-out Rez (Ferdia Walsh-Peelo) in breaking into the school and trashing the Headmaster’s car. (The Headmaster catches them in the act, but does nothing about it except to shake his head sadly—only the first sign that not everything we see should be taken literally.)
Then the three witness a tragedy when they see a young girl killed in the street by a car, a purportedly traumatic experience that eventually factors into Rez’s decision to attempt suicide but in the meantime seems merely to confuse Matthew about his feelings and to prod the already unstable Kearney to become even more inured to violence. A fourth character is added to the mix—Jen (Anya Taylor-Joy), a bright young girl who quite rightly dismisses Kearney’s toxic show of masculinity but is attracted to sensitive Matthew.
Kearney either goes off to America for a few weeks, or perhaps fantasizes that he does, and returns even more vicious, bragging about the kick that comes from beating up homeless men and the natural promiscuousness of women. Matthew puts up with his friend’s outrages until Kearney does the unforgivable—trying to take advantage of Jen; then a confrontation between them becomes inevitable, and Matthew will be left to reflect melancholically on the sage words his teacher had spoken to him a few months earlier and to tell us tritely that this might have been “the summer that changes everything.”
Macken tries to overcome the fatuousness of all this by laying on the glitz in repeated visits to clubs with ever-changing light shows and throbbing music and employing hyperkinetic montages and look-at-this visual gymnastics. Worst of all is the resort to occasional fantasy sequences involving a crass TV show whose repulsive host (Travis Fimmel) prods the characters to embrace their worst impulses or invites us to judge them when they do. The young actors seem a talented enough group, but none of them can induce us to sympathize with these characters or care about what will happen to them. The sole Blu-ray extra is the theatrical trailer. Not recommended.