8.5 Hours: review

Having heard nothing about it – not even watching the trailer – until we attended the premiere on Wednesday, we had no idea what to expect from Brian Lally’s debut film 8.5 Hours. However, the film that has won awards up and down the country, and been screened at numerous film festivals (including Cannes and the Galway Film Fleadh), failed to impress.

The film follows a working day in the lives of four Dubliners: Rachel (Lynette Callaghan), trying desperately to raise enough money to secure the flash, Dublin 4 apartment that she just ‘HAS to have!’; Frank (Art Kearns), the oblivious husband, happily golfing his life away with his wife by his side; Tony (Jonathan Byrne), the coke snorting love rat, delighting in bedding as many women as possible; and Eoin (Victor Burke) the supposedly loved up fiancé, busy planning the perfect wedding with future wife, Lisa (Clodagh Reid).

Thanks to acting that makes Keanu Reeves look like Laurence Olivier, the characters’ incredible two-dimensionality is made glaringly obvious, and the plot isn’t much better, with office-based interactions lacking any level of depth or believability.

Allegedly working for a successful software company, the 4 protagonists are crammed into a small room in a Georgian house for most of the day (a lot of the action takes place through flashbacks), where they are ‘coding’ (read as: looking at text files, intermittently copy/pasting a few lines of them) some piece of software that they admit to not knowing the function of.

In a series of preposterously unfortunate events, which, realistically, could never happen in the titular time period, we see the characters’ lives fall apart and get, for the most part, rebuilt.

The film loses any of its credibility in a ridiculous finale that not even the above par acting skills of Geraldine Plunkett can save. Not wanting to go into much detail for fear of revealing the absurd take on a predictable plot-twist, the film spirals completely out of control, becoming an almost-farcical mockery of itself.

Another problem with this film is the juxtaposition of incredibly pedestrian, soap-opera plots with mindbogglingly dramatic story arcs, mostly involving sex and drugs. There’s even a gratuitous threesome. The contrast – which may be a theatrical device – serves only to solidify the viewer’s inability to identify with the characters on any level.

This truly is an awful, appalling film. It tries too hard to be controversial, while only managing to be awkward and uncomfortable. Never have we emerged from a film so absolutely drained.

8.5 Hours? It certainly felt like it.

Thanks to Claire for co-writing this review.