Lucy is a disillusioned office clerk, living with her partner, Paul, and is dependent on tablets. She takes them, and then eventually, she just begins to flush them down the toilet and Paul clocks onto this quite early on. Obviously, he's noticing the difference in Lucy's personality. Paul, on the other hand, is quite introverted. He's become locked away, probably from the complacency of his job. He's a screenwriter, obviously, a lot of that involves writing in an office from home, so is not managing to get out of the house. There's a good recurring motif about tennis, about how he wants to go out and play tennis with Lucy. But he's not able to do that. He's struggling with a little bit of social anxiety, with the fact that in the one scene where he manages to get out of his house, how far does he go? Was he actually going to go there. And really, his only interactions in the film, come with those kinds of post work conversations with Lucy at their house, and the postman, who he seems to have this kind of dysfunctional relationship with. A lot of the comedy actually stems from those interactions and from those conversations.
There's some very authentic dialogue throughout the film, some really relatable conversations are moments that I'm sure anyone in a long standing relationship will be able to see some truth in. And again, I think that is an absolute strength of the script, that Mikey Murray has obviously written this thinking about maybe his own interactions with certain people, maybe relationships that he's had with other people. And he's got this idea of dialogue. And this idea of the way that people talk to each other in real life situations. In those situations where you've been with your partner for X amount of years, what is that conversation going to be like, on a Wednesday night after you finished work? And one of us been at home all day? What would you go from there? Those kinds of tit for tat conversations about one of you go into the shop, because there's no bread in and all that kind of stuff. It all fits in really, really nicely with the mood of the film.
The big kind of disruptor to the film's narrative is Daniel to this new colleague of Lucy, who sort of enters the film quite early on a party at the house and Lucia begins to develop some kind of relationship or infatuation with him. You know, they go and play sports together. And then it kind of culminates in a scene I'm not going to spoil where they essentially get to a hotel room. And the way that the film deals with how Lucy proceeds after that point is extremely interesting, because as an audience member who's seen a lot of different films, I was sat there thinking, "Oh, well, this is going to go this way" And it doesn't. It's interesting in how it unfolds. And it makes sense, actually, in the way that it unfolds. And I quite liked that kind of uniqueness to it. But I've not seen it a lot in films like this.
After the film, Mikey came over and asked me what I thought about it. And he mentioned how there were no explosions or any kind of big budget set pieces. There was a bit of a joke about the fact that in a number of different scenes, his actors were using his own record collection. And actually they were the most dangerous scenes that they had to film. And what I think Mikey was sort of alluding to are getting out is that he knows it's a no frills film. He knows it's a very kind of like social realist, very small, again, low budget film that relies heavily on the strength of its script and with that, the strength of its performances.
Now I have to say Steve Oram is absolutely fantastic in this film, and his comic timing is second to none. His improvisation as we will get to in a second is amazing. As is Eilis Cahill as Lucy who again puts in this absolutely stellar performance and the trajectory of her character, where she starts off in a certain place and because of her dependency on pills, and the fact that she chooses not to take her personality changes to her outlook on life changes, she becomes a little bit more pessimistic, the filter kind of disappears. The performance on that level of her being a kind of straight and narrow average worker to her then move into this unfiltered reactive person is an absolute credit to Eilis' performance.
Mind-Set is very funny, very sharp, very witty, with a smattering of improvisation. Now, they mentioned this in a Q&A, that while the script was quite rigid, and they stuck to the script quite rigidly because of the 11 day shoot, but there was an allowance to have some sort of improvisation and the absolute masters of the craft being Steve and Eilis, with lines about fish fingers and things like that, that were just thrown in, and actually improvised, and it just added more to the kind of authenticity of the relationship.
