Disco Pigs (Cert 15)

by ALEXANDER WALKER, Evening Standard

Disco Pigs deals with a mutually destructive relationship between two teens of incestuous closeness. It is set in working class Ireland and is loud, violent, vulgar and pointless.

The couple, a leering punk nicknamed Pig (Cillian Murphy) and his obsessed girlfriend called Runt

(Elaine Cassidy), are twins in all but common provenance.

They were born at the same minute to different parents, move like synchronised automata, live as next-door neighbours and hold hands from their beds through holes in the brick walls.

They are linked, too, by the same symbiotic folly as the couple in My Brother Tom, except that these two are such a danger to the community as well as themselves that they ought straightway to be "sectioned" and kept in separate asylums.

The acting is over the top, even by Irish standards, and Murphy's adopted line of baby-talk in a thick Cork accent makes him unintelligible for much of the movie.

It all ends in blood and tears but, oh! the boredom in between induced by debut director Kirsten Sheridan's indulgence of her rabid characters.

The money for it was put up by Rod Stoneman's Irish Film Board, a British production company called Renaissance that once did good work with Ken Branagh in his Shakespeare films, and, more ominously, by an English-based pension fund that can only be doing it for the tax breaks. The best of Irish luck to them all.

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