myth and magic

a date for mad mary

Isolation is a familiar feeling to most young teens. I remember praying that somebody else felt the same as me in my early secondary school years. Growing up gay in rural Ireland, I could never find anyone else like me and had to turn to TV and film in search of a reflection of myself. Everything I ended up watching, however, was about American teenagers; they scratched the surface of my emotions but I always felt a degree of inauthenticity while watching. They were talking about someone similar to me but they didn’t truly get me. That is, until one day, when I was scrolling through YouTube and stumbled upon the trailer for an upcoming Irish film, A Date for Mad Mary (Darren Thornton, 2016). I was mesmerised, begging my dad to drive me to the closest cinema showing it - 90 minutes away. When I left the cinema 82 minutes after that, I felt something I never had before after watching a film: I felt understood.

In the film, Mary McArdle (Seána Kerslake) returns home to Drogheda after a short stint in prison and must find a date for her best friend’s (Charleigh Bailey) wedding. A simple plot with strong rom-com DNA but director/co-writer Thornton takes the plot in an unexpected direction as we follow Mary in her wickedly funny and surprisingly moving journey towards self-acceptance.

Throughout the film, we see something eating Mary alive: an anger that slowly destroys every aspect of her life. An anger that I also felt; we were both dealt a hand of cards that we couldn’t play and forced to deal with it. As Adrienne Rich once said, “a life I didn’t choose chose me.” Finally, I had found someone who felt the same as me and it was amazing. There have been other Irish films exploring sexuality but none are quite like Mad Mary.

Unlike films such as Handsome Devil (John Butler, 2016), Mad Mary is intrinsically Irish -- it could not be set anywhere else. Often Irish movies sell themselves short in an attempt to appeal to international audiences but, as Normal People (Lenny Abrahamson and Hettie Macdonald, 2020) shows, weaving Irish identity into a film or TV series gives it an authenticity with which everyone - regardless of nationality - can connect. Seeing Mary working in a chipper I could’ve gone to after a night out, or walking streets that I had walked, it showed me there were people like me, people who did the same things I did, and felt the same way I felt. It was refreshing to see a truly Irish film at a time when they were few and far between.

It’s a shame that A Date for Mad Mary never had the success of other Irish movies. Like many small, homegrown films, it didn’t get the wide release or publicity it deserved so, despite an array of positive reviews, it fell disappointingly under the radar. In spite of this, I do believe that it has cult-classic potential. I’ve returned to this film since I’ve lost my anger and accepted myself and it never feels stale; I find myself relating to new parts of the film and laughing at the jokes like it’s the first time I’ve seen it. So, if you haven’t already, I urge you to watch this future Irish classic. katie mckenna