Children are again at the core of Lodge Kerrigan's troubled new world. His latest film, Keane, revisits mental illness in a milieu of urban dread. TIM WONG probes further.


THE PLIGHT of children remains a constant waypoint in cinema: most recently, audiences have been battered by the scars of abuse in Mysterious Skin, the peril of a stolen infant in The Child, and the abandonment of a young family in Nobody Knows. This year, festival-goers will confront the horrors of child murder in Sympathy for Lady Vengeance. Why filmmakers are so regularly drawn to the endangerment of children isn’t entirely clear; for starters, what they invariably share is a mutual childhood or parenthood. No doubt there’s something incredibly evocative about the experiences we harvest as youngsters – sentimental, joyous, but namely traumatic memoirs seem to stick with us the most. Being lost (or as a parent, losing a child) may rank amongst the more distressing and commonplace of these, an anxiety of separation that informs this festival’s most unnerving film, Keane.

If children are the immediate victims in Lodge Kerrigan’s new film, its tormented protagonist, William Keane (Damian Lewis), reveals himself as a victim of his own mental health: at first impression, a grieving father devastated by the abduction of his daughter at Manhattan’s Port Authority bus terminal; later we learn, a psychologically disturbed man and potential hazard to those in his care. Entrusted with the guardianship of 7-year-old Kira (Abigail Breslin) by her mother Lynn (Amy Ryan) – a financially-troubled woman he befriends in the dilapidated motel hallway they share – William’s responsibility is tested in the face of his unstable condition. Schizophrenia, an affliction victimised in its own way, finds itself a casualty of media stigmatisation, particularly the movies. Kerrigan’s reapproach aches to eschew such ignorant tropes – think the numerous plot twists (Fight Club, Identity, High Tension etc.) that derive the illness as a scapegoat – and the finished product is certainly without contrived sensation. Interestingly, this look-but-don’t-touch understanding also agitates much of the uneasy tension in Keane, coaxing forth our own extreme prejudices of the mentally ill, from the deluded, to the suicidal, to the violent and psychopathic.

And so we assume the worst of William as he collects Kira from school, treats her to McDonalds, shampoos her hair, and puts her to bed. But like the schizophrenic Peter in Kerrigan’s 1994 film Clean, Shaven, the introduction of a daughter – or in William’s case, a surrogate for his missing child – serves as a pacifier for his erratic behaviour, a mute button for the voices in his head. Paternal instinct kicks in, and the authenticity of William’s back-story – brought into question when footnotes from his past and the nature of his disorder emerge – is reaffirmed. That’s one interpretation anyway. In mining the same thematic territory of Clean, Shaven, Kerrigan could be accused of wrangling all-too-obvious sense of dread, predicated on the vulnerability of children: just as we query Peter’s involvement in a string of child murders, a sceptical low front clouds William’s every move. Did he really have a daughter? Will he hurt the ubiquitously cute kid? Whether by design or not, the role of schizophrenia as a sparkplug for the suspense thriller becomes precariously apparent: problematic, for this is an emblem of crude genre Kerrigan ought to avoid. It is also an inherent – and perhaps forgivable – side effect of tackling the complexities of mental illness.

That William is a ticking time bomb may seem a little neat, but it’s akin to the friction that coiled The Son so arrestingly – a film at once manipulative and miraculous, and one I’ve come to admire after initial doubts. Indeed, the circuitry between Keane and Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne is strong, with the aesthetic wiring seemingly intertwined. Kerrigan however employs the Dardenne’s verite headlock with a firmer, visceral perspective: less the distorted fragments of alien consciousness in Clean, Shaven, less the eyesore of Olivier Gourmet’s receding hairline. Stubbornly, we’re lodged within the periphery of William’s headspace, right besides the devil perched on his shoulder. Hardly a subtle technique for externalising Keane’s internal combustion, the fact that it’s claustrophobic – an intrusion of personal and mental space – makes it work.

The debilitating squalor of New York helps: gone are the Gershwin skylines and sidewalk chic of Woody Allen’s Big Apple, replaced by a post-9/11 doom and gloom, complete with seedy Irish pubs, back alley cocaine dens, and filthy inner city dwellings. Poverty is a brief flashpoint, recalling the Dardenne’s Palme d’Or winning Rosetta, but the urban malaise at work here plays a larger part in backing God’s Lonely Man into a corner, introverting him into a state of solitary confinement. Smothered by his surroundings, Keane’s inevitable lapse in sanity comes not so much as a certainty, but a cry for help, a plea to extradite his past. Articulated by Damien Lewis’ tough performance, this is undeniably powerful stuff. Kerrigan, whose unsettling debut film should have signalled greater things, but instead was marked by a decade in the wilderness, retreads the same dark territory with renewed urgency.