Advertisement

Movies & TV News & Features

Snap

SNAP (Carmel Winters). See listing. Rating: NN


Gimmicky Irish psychodrama Snap features a ferocious performance by Aisling O’Sullivan, but not much else.

O’Sullivan, who’s probably best known here for her roles in Neil Jordan’s The Butcher Boy and Tim Roth’s The War Zone, is utterly convincing as Sandra, a single mother we first encounter as she’s being interviewed about a terrible crime for which she’s still being persecuted three years later.

Smoking, cursing and glaring balefully into the lens, Sandra is little more than an exposed nerve, and O’Sullivan makes the prickly, confrontational character mesmerizing and enigmatic.

But just as Snap seems ready to go somewhere interesting, writer/director Carmel Winters starts to undermine her own movie, abandoning her found footage to jump back in time and fill in the details of the aforementioned crime – which, we quickly learn, started when Sandra’s teenage son Stephen (Stephen Moran) impulsively abducted a toddler in a public park.

From there, Winters proceeds to neuter every aspect of the story she’s set up, to the point where what we’re shown at the outset doesn’t even make sense by the time the movie ends. She repeatedly dangles awful possibilities in front of us before retreating to safer ground, unwilling to follow through on any of them.

No wonder O’Sullivan seems so furious on some level she must have known that for all her raging, this wouldn’t amount to anything at all.

Opens Friday (August 24) at the Projection Booth.

Advertisement

Exclusive content and events straight to your inbox

Subscribe to our Newsletter

This field is for validation purposes and should be left unchanged.

By signing up, I agree to receive emails from Now Toronto and to the Privacy Policy and Terms & Conditions.