IDLE HANDS
2024
Writer, Director, Producer
Ronan Kerrigan
Executive Producer, Director Of Photography
Keith O'Grady
Assistant Director
Tomola White
Production Designer
Brianna McDevitt
Starring
Elisha McCrory
Andrew McCracken
Ronan Kerrigan
A day in the life of Laura and Corey, a married couple struggling with depression. Corey has lost his job to alcoholism and is now trapped in a spiral of depressive hedonia, constantly in haste for the next fleeting high. Laura has found herself in a life confined by her social obligations, serving a life term of supporting her husband who is paralyzed by depression and addiction, through minimum wage work. The young couple live clashing internal lives, Corey secretly coming closer to actualizing his suicidal ideation while Laura secretly hides a discovery that may weigh the couple deeper into an existential hell.
This film is a cold and austere look at every day life in Northern Ireland, contextualising simple everyday chores as profoundly existential and painful. Elements of this project are very personal to me, not only because it was shot on location in my home village with contributions from friends, family, and the local community, but also because aspects of the story are informed by personal experience.
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This is my first funded project that was made with the support of Northern Ireland Screen, prior to this funding I was set to shoot and direct it with no budget with only myself and Elisha McCrory working on the project, but when NI Screen got back to us with a budget I was able to bring a wonderful team onto the project. The film depicts the experience of depression within a Northern Irish context, chronicling a day in the life of a married couple dealing with addiction, poverty, and infidelity. The qualities of depression are conveyed through the medium, the narrowing perspective of life as a meaningless chase for one high or another is portrayed through the narrowing of the camera's perspective onto the character's hands, focusing on the piercing innocuousness of the moment-to-moment material of their lives. The feeling of indefinite peril is demonstrated through the duration of shots, dragging out seemingly inconsequential moments of life until they become unbearably torturous. Both characters cope with their depression differently, by dreaming of a golden ticket to take them away, or dreaming of a head-on car collision, but they both want to escape.
Exploring the political dimension of depression, the story and characters which are informed by real-life experiences of suicidal ideation, addiction, and accounts of life in the small village the film was shot in, Sion Mills, just outside Strabane. The story unfolds through the intimacy of the lead character's hands, how they move, what they hold, and when they let go.
“If it is true, for instance, that depression is constituted by low serotonin levels, what still needs to be explained is why particular individuals have low serotonin levels. This requires a social and political explanation; and the task of repoliticising mental illness is an urgent one if the left wants to challenge capitalist realism.”
-Mark Fisher
