Assuaging a decade of monetary guilt

Frank Burke (Peter Coonan) is a Dublin taxi driver attending the funeral of his father. Flash back ten years to his daughter’s eighth birthday party.

He was pulling strings then to stay economically afloat. This brought out an ugly streak in him. Can he forgive himself for it and find peace at last?

Exactly what strings he pulled isn’t fully explained. The film works on implication and innuendo. By the end, in many ways, we’re no wiser than his long-suffering wife Jenny (Olivia Caffrey).

Writer-director Dermot Malone’s debut presents us with a fundamentally decent man. He’s keeping a tenuous hold on his life as circumstances spin out of control. Malone builds the tension in a manner that threatens to explode in every scene.

It only does once. I won’t say how. But even here he keeps a lid on it, directing it in an almost poetic manner. The music score becomes a kind of orchestral counterpoint here as elsewhere in this cathartically atmospheric work.

Coonan is a revelation, conveying false slickness as he tries to stave off creditors and prevent further debts amassing. His desperation put me in mind of everyone from Jack Lemmon in Glengarry Glen Ross to the Willie Loman of Death of a Salesman.

When the Celtic Tiger stopped roaring in this country many people lost their jobs, their marriages, their fortunes – and in some cases even their lives. The memory of such tragedies is what makes this film so resonant. King’ Frankie becomes a kind of microcosm of these people. He searches for the holy grail of consumerism before becoming swamped under its excesses.

Marlon Brando once said that no matter how many films he made, people kept asking him about a particular scene he did, the one in On the Waterfront where he tells his brother “I could have been a contender.” He believed the reason was because everyone in the world could identify with a character who fell short of his ambitions.

Frank Burke is such a character. His path to a tenuous redemption is transmitted to us with vision and depth.