This
Christmas homecoming story about a lawyer and his autistic brother is predictable but fits like a well-worn onesie
’Tis the season for festive comedy-dramas about awkward and/or farcical homecomings. There will be worse ways to dodge the high-street rush than this genial, Christmas-set
Irish indie, in which hotshot Boston lawyer Daniel (Michiel Huisman) returns to his native Cork after his mother’s death to chaperone autistic teenage brother Louis (Samuel Bottomley).
Writer-director Aoife Crehan acknowledges a certain debt to Barry Levinson’s once prizewinning, now unfashionable Rain Man early on, and proves no less upfront about her dramatic contrivances. The first act is a veritable blizzard of twaddle designed to get the brothers and mortuary assistant Mary (Niamh Algar) into a Volvo bearing a coffin containing the body of the stranger that Daniel sat next to on his flight. Weather that, and you can settle in for a middle-of-the-road road movie across a drizzly, provincial Ireland: gently heartwarming, mildly amusing, only vaguely related to real life. Inevitably, family secrets are unearthed and worked through en route; inevitably, the two grown-ups have a moment, then a tiff, before pushing on towards reconciliation.