‘Baite’ review: Conventional murder mystery unfolds in 1970s Ireland

Dir: Ruan Magan. Eire. 2025. 94mins

The settled calm of a rural group is shattered by the invention of a long-hidden physique in Baite. Ruan Magan’s Irish-language debut characteristic serves up a mix of homicide thriller and household drama during which the occasions of the previous hang-out the current. Sheena Lambert has tailored her 2015 novel The Lake for the display screen, and the acquainted nature of the plotting and traditional execution counsel a future extra tailor-made to house viewing than theatrical following a world premiere at Galway.

Watchable with out ever changing into actually gripping

A protracted-established director of shorts, tv sequence and documentaries (The Flourishing, Steps Of Freedom), Magan succumbs to cliché from the beginning as he opens the movie with drone pictures of County Galway’s verdant, picturesque countryside, set to a rating of plaintive strings and ethereal voices. This strategy lacks a particular edge, and indicators a movie that may appear fully at house among the many many related choices out there on tv and streaming providers.  

Baite is ready within the late summer time of 1975 in Glanaphuca, a sleepy backwater the place ‘nothing attention-grabbing occurs’ – till the invention of a physique and the arrival of Dublin-based detective Frank Ryan (a laconic, subdued Moe Dunford). On the coronary heart of this area people is Peggy Casey (Eleanor O’Brien), who runs the native pub and  boasts proudly that it provides ”the perfect bar menu within the county”. She takes her each day swim in a man-made lake that covers the remnants of an outdated village and its cemetery. A chronic dry season has lowered water ranges and two visiting anglers uncover a feminine physique, preserved within the silt. There’s a collective willpower to conclude this should be a physique from the outdated cemetery. Ryan arrives to determine the reality.

In greatest Agatha Christie custom, Baite depicts a small group filled with shifty people with one thing to cover – though you do lengthy for the eccentricity of a Bruno Dumont world, simply to lend it some flavour. Peggy appears significantly jittery and overwrought, apprehensive concerning the influence on her beloved pub at a time when it already feels underneath risk. Her siblings are satisfied the time has come to promote the household enterprise and transfer on with their lives. Her sister Carla (Fionnuala Gygax) desires to go away for Australia, brother Jerome (Mark MacGearailt) is looking for a contemporary begin in Dublin along with his accomplice, and oldest brother Hugo (Gearoid Kavanagh) is already a profitable businessman in London. The destiny of the pub runs in parallel with a homicide investigation that inevitably opens outdated wounds and spills responsible secrets and techniques.

Initially a homicide thriller, Lambert’s screenplay finds traces of wry humour within the informal sexism of the interval and the competence of an area police drive that consists of 1 garda and a phone that doesn’t work. There’s an empathy with those that really feel trapped by old-school attitudes and lengthy for the liberties of metropolis life. The acknowledgement of social and cultural pressures provides some heft to a much less delicate floor story that feels obliged to push Peggy and Frank in the direction of a obscure, unconvincing romance.

A sequence of flashbacks hyperlink the story to a time when the unique village was flooded and assist to fill within the blanks concerning the useless girl and her place in the neighborhood’s historical past. But Baite is slightly too neat and tidy in the way in which it ties up all of the unfastened ends, leaving a movie that’s watchable with out ever changing into actually gripping.