Wake opens impressionistically, with a scattergun series of nocturnal shots showing a young man running to a bridge’s underpass, the sounds of a splashing struggle, and the same man on top of a bridge in heavy traffic, looking over the edge. We then see this man, Josh (Arthur Holmes), being guided through an institutional dormitory by kindly, overworked staff member Zoe (Indra Ové) who at first we imagine is admitting Josh to his new lodgings, until it becomes apparent that old Mick (Ian Burfield), coughing and slumped over a toilet, is not to be Josh’s roommate, but is in fact his father, whom Josh is merely visiting.
Like his rubbish-strewn room and piss-stained bed, Mick is a mess. Wheelchair-bound and dying of liver failure owing to his chronic alcoholism, he is barely coherent, but manages to be rude even to the few people still willing to help him – and he cannot stop drinking, despite the immense damage that he is doing to himself and others.
“It’s like chalk and cheddar,” Mick says of the ‘regional accents’ that he ascribes to ducks, “same species, different planet.” As he sits on a bench by the river with his son, Mick might as well be describing their own relationship. For here blood is thinner than beer, and Josh’s love for his father is doomed to go unreciprocated, right to a bitter end that resolves the confusion of images seen at the beginning.
A wake is all at once a trace of turbulence left in water by a passing object, and a (typically drunken) gathering for someone’s funeral. Writer/director Alan McKenna’s debut short feels like a bit of both, as it observes, in various waterside settings, a deeply flawed man’s passing, while tracking the toll of alcoholism on the next generation. It is an open-eyed, upsettingly bleak glimpse into a cyclical, terminal condition of self-destruction, and it ends, symbolically, with Josh sitting alone in the same room previously occupied by his father, contemplating his own empty legacy.
strap: Alan McKenna’s harrowing debut short follows a son caught in the backwash of his father’s chronic alcoholism.
© Anton Bitel
