Re-Creation [Tribeca Festival Review]
Jim Sheridan, the Oscar-nominated director of My Left Foot and In the Name of the Father, takes a bold cinematic step with his latest effort, Re-Creation. Co-directed with David Merriman, the movie, which screened at the 2025 Tribeca Festival, attempts to find resolution in the 1996 murder of filmmaker Sophie Toscan Du Plantier. The prime suspect, journalist Ian Bailey, was never tried in Ireland, although the French government declared him guilty.
To pull this off, Sheridan and Merriman have created a hybrid between fiction and reality. Their script is based on court transcripts, witness testimony, forensic evidence, and more. It imagines what might have happened had Bailey faced trial. Twelve jurors meet in a room to go over the facts of the case and try to make sense of its inconsistencies. Twelve Angry Men is a clear inspiration story-wise, as eleven jurors initially want to convict, but the twelfth (Vicky Krieps) isn’t sure. Considerable back and forth takes place, with Juror 3 (John Connors) taking an adversarial role.
Put another way, Re-Creation offers fictional characters dissecting real evidence. What becomes undeniably clear is that so much of the case doesn’t add up, thanks to an incomplete police investigation. Listening to the characters argue about what something means or what someone’s motivation may have been illustrates just how much gray area there was, and how little black and white.
Where the film stumbles, not insignificantly, is in assuming the audience is as obsessed with the case as the directors are. A lot of information is thrown at the viewer very quickly. If you aren’t already intimately familiar with the details of this unsolved mystery, it’s easy to get lost. Sheridan additionally over relies on expository dialogue that slows down the momentum of the courtroom drama.
Vicky Krieps is typically excellent, and there’s much to admire about Re-Creation’s experimental nature. But unless you have an active interest in the nitty gritty of the Sophie Toscan Du Plantier case, the film works better as an experiment than it does as a piece of storytelling.
© 2025 Mike McGranaghan