Polly Steele and Darren Thornton (respectively) (2025)

Two new Irish films with the word “four” in their titles had gala screenings within days of each other at the Dublin International Film Festival (DIFF) in early 2025. With a cast headed by Gabriel Byrne, Helena Bonham Carter and Pierce Brosnan, and a script adapted by Niall Williams from his own best-selling novel, it is not that surprising that Four Letters of Love was chosen for the mid-week Lord Mayor’s Gala on  February 26, after its international premiere at the British and Irish Film Festival in Christchurch, New Zealand the previous November. The festival’s closing film, Four Mothers, had been seen at a small number of festivals (London, Chicago, Palm Springs, Göteborg, Glasgow, BFI Flare) before its screenings at DIFF on March 2. Even if they appeared to have few other similarities, the coincidental naming quirk was no doubt appreciated by the festival programmers. The serendipity also kept me thinking about them together in the intervening months even as their separate, subsequent theatrical releases took place. This ongoing rumination held despite my initial reaction that they were very different films; not only depicting different eras but also seemingly from different eras, offering different visions of Ireland for different audiences. Four Letters of Love is the kind of heritage cinema representing a simpler, traditional Ireland that Hollywood producers seek for American audiences, while Four Mothers is a poignant comedy – a melancomedy, perhaps – from writer-director brothers Darren and Colin Thornton (A Date for Mad Mary) forming part of a post-Marriage Equality Referendum cinema exploring queer Irish lives (Macleod, Kerrigan). I will not be contradicting the critical consensus that Four Letters of Love, in spite of a few laudable features, is a weak film, while Four Mothers is a strong one. Instead, I will make some observations prompted by considering the films’ echoes and resonances.

Focalised by characters who write, both films are substantially concerned with the familial cost of artistic expression, although these concerns are worked out in very different contexts. Set some time in the mid- to late-twentieth century, Four Letters of Love addresses its themes with melodramatic excess in which metaphysical forces intervene in the lives of the characters. It opens with 17-year-old Nicholas Coughlan (Fionn O’Shea) narrating how his civil servant father William (Brosnan) receives a message from God and abandons his job for good and his family for months at a time while he retreats to paint in the west of Ireland. This mysterious act, and its impact on her ordered suburban domestic life leads Nicholas’s mother Bette (Imelda May) to have a nervous breakdown. The deterioration in her health eventually causes her death, leaving Nicholas to look after himself until he resolves to follow his father west. Returning to Dublin, William gives his best painting as a prize in a poetry contest before dying in a house fire. Meanwhile, on a western island, another defining act (perhaps divine) occurs: Isabel Gore (Ann Skelly) is singing on the seashore with her musician brother Sean (Dónal Finn) when he is struck down by unexplained paralysis. Some time later, Isabel is sent by her schoolteacher and frustrated-poet father Muiris (Byrne) and Mother Margaret (Bonham-Carter) to a convent boarding school in Galway. Fleeing the unfamiliar convent strictures, Isabel meets the appealing but unreliable Peadar O’Luing (Ferdia Walsh-Peelo). Their relationship develops until she marries him, just when Nicholas arrives on the island looking for his father’s painting, which Muiris had won. His arrival also coincides with Sean’s recovery, and Nicholas becomes besotted with Isabel, writing her the titular letters, which Margaret ensures never reach her now unhappily married daughter on the mainland. Nevertheless, Nicholas and Isabel are united in a cathartic scene that may be more wish-fulfilment than reality but is one foreshadowed in Muiris’s poem and William’s painting.

Art’s capability to create alternative escape routes from an unpleasant reality might also be said to characterise Four Mothers, but that film focuses more meaningfully on the competing demands of care and creativity. Inspired by Gianni di Gregorio’s Mid-August Lunch (Pranzo di ferragosto; 2008), the film is set in contemporary Dublin and centres on Edward Brady (James McArdle), a gay author struggling to promote a breakthrough young-adult novel while caring for his ageing mother Alma (Fionnula Flanagan), who has suffered a stroke and can only communicate using a tablet. Although Edward’s therapist Dermot (Rory O’Neill/Panty Bliss) advises him to be assertive and tell his mother he is going to America to promote his book, Dermot and two of his other gay friends scupper this by abandoning their mothers with Edward as they head off to Gran Canaria for a hedonistic weekend at the Maspalomas Pride celebrations. Already finding his mother’s criticisms undermining his fragile self-confidence as he attempts to publicise his novel in advance of the US tour, Edward now has to care for three other older women whose various needs and personalities he must accommodate. In his initial panic to meet even their basic care, he calls on help from Raf (Gaëtan Garcia), Alma’s physiotherapist and his former boyfriend. Significantly, we learn that they split up because of Edward’s inability to commit to the relationship. While his book tour seems ever more in doubt, Edward and the acquainted mothers gradually build a rapport. In spite of their growing affection, he is dismissive of their sentimental recounting of their lives with their deceased husbands, pointing out their blindness to the gender inequalities of their generation, and their failure to acknowledge the absence of reciprocal care and consideration they ought to have received from the men they had looked after and now miss.

The film does not  need to hammer this point home. Early scenes between MacArdle and Flanagan are often beautifully tender, when they are not undercutting too much sentimentality by showing that Alma’s recourse to electronic communication has in no way restricted her ability to tell her son exactly when she feels he is doing something wrong. The audience experiences something of a generational rebalancing of care by Edward and his gay friends, in spite of the fact that they have left him temporarily in the lurch while they get some respite. For the mothers, however, suggestions of their husbands’ neglect do not prompt them to make recriminations. Instead, they become more determined to visit Maura, a Galway-based medium (Niamh Cusack), to contact their deceased spouses to make sure they are happy in the afterlife. With this objective in mind, they persuade Edward to arrange a road trip on a care-centre bus that Raf borrows. This becomes a mostly amusing episode, but there is renewed poignancy in Edward’s again choosing to put his mother’s needs before his own, echoing what his mother has done in the past for him, his brother and his father.

In this way, Four Mothers reflects the heteronormativity of films such as Four Letters of Love, which has no openly queer characters and whose family dynamics are largely patriarchal. Nicholas’ main parental relationship is with his father, despite William’s absences from his life and the disastrous consequences his choices have for them all. Nicholas also looks after Bette following William’s abandonment, but that relationship receives little attention in the film. Indeed, the four mothers of Four Letters of Love are narratively neglected. Until the end of the film, Bette is the only mother figure in Nicholas’s life, but Isabel has three: her own mother Margaret, the mother superior at the convent (Brid Ní Chumhaill) and her future mother-in-law Maire Mhor (Norma Sheahan). The relatively benign, if stern, mother superior and the openly hostile Maire have little screentime to develop beyond these brief sketches, but Margaret is a major character (played by Bonham-Carter). The fact that the star actress had been committed to ensuring the production of the film for several years, was revealed by Williams at the Q&A session after the DIFF screening, and this was central to its completion. Nevertheless, while Margaret is a largely sympathetic figure, and the chemistry between Bonham-Carter and Byrne one of the film’s genuine pleasures, she is not an unproblematically good mother from the perspective of a narrative whose cutting between the episodes in the lives of Nicholas and Isabel requires that they will ultimately unite. Margaret is the force that keeps them apart by repeatedly destroying Nicholas’s letters to Isabel and compelling him to reach the quota inscribed in the title. It is only then, it seems, that she realises that Muiris’ poem had prophesied this all along, and she has been merely the instrument and not the author of events because she is not one of the film’s artistic characters.

But Four Letters of Love seems to highlight the dilemma of how Four Mothers’ narrative can be resolved or perhaps even to clarify the problem it poses. While Edward openly critiques the patriarchal social relations that the mothers have had to live through, he seems compelled to benefit from them. He is also an artistically active man who needs to reconcile his caring responsibilities with his professional ambitions. And for all her skill with her tablet, Alma’s loss of her voice seems to represent a literal lack of self-expression. But it is through the tablet that Alma becomes the author of the film’s resolution. As the possibility of the book tour seem to vanish, she wakes Edward from an adjacent bedroom to tell him that he has to live his life. In an emotionally satisfying resolution, we see Alma following his success on the tablet screen with the other three mothers who are caring for her in Edward’s absence.