Emily Watson’s performance is extraordinary: God’s Creatures reviewed

There are some films that you know will be quality simply by the actors who have agreed to be in them. They’re like a kitemark. Emily Watson is such an actor, as is Paul Mescal, who hasn’t put a foot wrong since Normal People and must have an excellent agent or just a feel for these sorts of things, even if he’s bound to turn up in the Marvel franchise one of these days. Both Watson and Mescal star in God’s Creatures, so it’s double kitemarked, you could say. It’s a tough watch, and a tense watch, but it’s powerfully affecting and plainly quality through and through. It asks: mothers will always instinctively protect their sons, but is that sometimes misguided?

Written by Shane Cowley and co-directed by Saela Davis and Anna Rose Holmer, the film is set in a small coastal village in Ireland at an undetermined time, although, purely from the look of the cars it’s possibly the 1990s.