In his feature debut, writer/director Paul Harrison is up to a kind of sobering mischief. Who – and what – is a good man? The ostensible title character, Michael (Aidan Gillen), is an upwardly mobile Belfast banker. Leaving a pub one night, he steals another man’s cab, and when the offended party gives chase, he’s struck and killed by an oncoming car. Michael is wracked with guilt. He confides in no one, his work suffers and his wife is at her wits’ end. Meanwhile, in a South African township, Sifiso (Thabang Sidloyi), a student with a budding political conscience, joins activists in his impoverished Cape Town settlement in ‘diverting’ electricity to homes in need.
One expects the two stories will intersect in clichéd fashion, with Michael perhaps atoning for his sins in a manner that benefits young Sifiso. But that’s only partly true, as the scope of Harrison’s story reaches far beyond the relatively banal tale of a stolen cab and a hit-and-run. Nothing here is simple, and the film drives that home in a way that leaves the viewer with a distinct sense of foreboding.
John Anderson, Variety
