Robert Wynne-Simmons’s The Outcasts is a haunting and ultimately melancholy study of social ostracization and rebellion that takes place in rural Ireland sometime before the potato famine of 1845. The film felicitously combines an almost documentarian concern for the folkways of the peasants who till the muddy earth and the delicately wrought magical elements found in an Irish folk tale.
Pensive and taciturn Maura O’Donnell (Mary Ryan) is lame in one leg, and thus the target of bullying from the village children. Her two sisters have little interest in coming to her defense. Breda (Brenda Scallon) is a widow mostly preoccupied by taking care of their wayward father, Hugh (Dan Foley), while Janey (Bairbre Ní Chaoimh) has found herself in a family way thanks to local boy Eamon (Máirtín Jaimsie), who’s more interested in taking over the O’Donnell farm than starting a family.
Village relations seem timeless somehow,...
Pensive and taciturn Maura O’Donnell (Mary Ryan) is lame in one leg, and thus the target of bullying from the village children. Her two sisters have little interest in coming to her defense. Breda (Brenda Scallon) is a widow mostly preoccupied by taking care of their wayward father, Hugh (Dan Foley), while Janey (Bairbre Ní Chaoimh) has found herself in a family way thanks to local boy Eamon (Máirtín Jaimsie), who’s more interested in taking over the O’Donnell farm than starting a family.
Village relations seem timeless somehow,...
- 3/7/2025
- by Budd Wilkins
- Slant Magazine
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