Omagh (2005)

Directed by: Pete Travis | 146 minutes | drama | Actors: Garard McSorley, Michele Forbes, Brenda Fricker, Stuart Graham, Peter Ballance, Pauline Hutton, Fiona Glascott, Kathy Kiera Clarke, Claire Connor, Gerard Crossan, Ian McElhinney, Sarah Gillbert, Alan Devlin, Frances Quinn, Tara Lynne O’Neill

To be fair: ‘Omagh’ is not very exciting. In 1998, a splinter faction of the IRA detonates a bomb in a busy shopping street in the Irish town of Omagh. 29 people died on that day in August. After all, we know the television images and newspaper headlines. And if not from that miserable day in Omagh, then from another devastation after a bombing.

But meanwhile, your heart is beating in your throat during the first fifteen minutes of the film. You watch the makers of the bomb very closely during the final preparations. They do this in silence, like surgeons removing their fortieth appendix of that week. The car is quietly driven to its destination and the perpetrators report with an anonymous phone call that a bomb will go off within half an hour.

What is basically a dry narration of chronological events actually manages to build up the tension on a grand scale. The police close off the wrong part of the street (whether deliberately staged by a wrong tip) and you see people walking past the red car in question. Oh, not that couple in love, is it? Not that mother with three children? Not the old ladies doing their shopping? But, of course, there’s no good time for that bomb to go off.

In fact, you already know who is affected. Because Aiden Gallagher follows you just a little longer. Just like his father Michael. When his 21-year-old son is killed in the attack, he knows no place to find his grief and loss. The next of kin do not receive an answer to their questions from the authorities. And it is not at all certain whether the perpetrators will be prosecuted. For the peace process in Northern Ireland must under no circumstances be jeopardized.

It’s the standard story: life after a great loss, the different ways to deal with it. One wants to answer, the other wants to mourn in silence. Michael and his wife Patsy deal with this differently. Scriptwriters Paul Greengrass and Guy Hibbert take the same approach to Michael: the film is about the facts, the missteps of the police and security services. And not because of the torn hearts of the bereaved, the feeling of powerlessness and the search for a (new) destination in life. Michael does not come to new insights. Neither does the viewer. It’s little more than a nice look behind the scenes of political scheming, silent agreements between Sein Fein and Tony Blair and the hope for peace in Ireland.