Wildfire reunites two traumatised sisters by the Irish border

► Wildfire is in UK cinemas from 3 September.

There’s a kind of magic to landscapes around your childhood home, despite how they might have changed in the interim. As Kelly (Nika McGuigan) returns home to her sleepy border town in Northern Ireland, her travel is marked by checkpoints, system after system to get through. As she passes graffitied street signs – “Welcome to Northern Ireland” has become “Welcome to One Ireland”;  a house is painted with “Prepared for Peace Readied For War” – she also gets a peek of the wilderness, and is more surprised by the sudden appearance of a wolf than anything humans have been up to. In Cathy Brady’s Wildfire, people are shaped by their landscape as much as the politics, and Kelly’s return unsettles the “post-conflict” life of her sister Lauren (Nora-Jane Noone).

The sister’s reunion isn’t particularly warm; Lauren has spent their year apart terrified that Kelly was dead, and is angry at the sudden return as much as the abandonment. While Kelly fled, Lauren stayed behind with a job, a husband and a home, whose clean floors Kelly immediately dirties upon arrival. They are initially structured as opposites, but Lauren begins to slip back into roles she had with her sister before, Kelly’s presence disrupting the normalcy she has fought so hard for. The return is unsettling for Kelly, too, who dreams of their deceased mother in close-ups of her face and hands, unable to see a full or clear picture of her. 

‘Where did Kelly go?’ is the question Lauren and others ask, but the real mystery resides at home. As the sisters reunite and Kelly adjusts to life back in the border town, it’s clear the two have lived under the shadow of their parents’ fraught deaths, especially their mother’s. Their father was killed by a bomb during the Troubles, but it is uncertainties about whether their mother killed herself, and her reasons for doing so, that have shaped these two women. Brady’s screenplay invokes their mother through talismans such as a St Christopher medal and a red coat which Kelly begins to wear everywhere. The Troubles are something only whispered about; the majority of people, including Lauren, have attempted to move on. Kelly’s deliberate invocation of their dead mother startles the locals as much as Lauren, all of whom prefer not to speak of the circumstances surrounding her death.

The influence of wider political affairs on people’s lives is depicted heavyhandedly. Wildfire opens with news footage of the Troubles, the Good Friday agreement and present-day Brexit wrangling over the question of a hard border. The river behind the sister’s childhood home crosses the boundary between North and South; here, the sisters stretch their bodies as long as they can, repeating a game from childhood where they banter back and forth about which Ireland they’re in. Neither sister is explicitly political, Brady’s interest lying primarily with the toll the conflicts, and its peace, takes on the sisters.

Both Nora-Jane Noone and Nika McGuigan (who tragically passed away from cancer after the film was finished) shine in their roles, switching easily between the facility of a shared language and upbringing and a sense of wounded betrayal at being abandoned. Lauren tries hard to reject the destabilising force of her sister, but begins to slip up, jeopardising her job at a factory and her relationship with her husband. Kelly’s behaviour is erratic; at one point she attacks a man in the street for littering, and word quickly travels through this small town. 

Lauren’s life becomes increasingly unappealing to Kelly, who finds the relationships at work gossipy and sterile and is appalled that her husband is more concerned about the garden than about the wellbeing of her sister. Kelly tries to reach out to others, but misses cues, unable to mesh in a society that regards her as mentally ill. Both women are surrounded by people who care for them, but the memories haunting small towns can become oppressive. Lauren and Kelly begin to isolate themselves, returning to the savage wounds of childhood and erecting their own invisible borders against the world around them. Brady’s film is a little too didactic about the lasting impacts of political trauma on the individual, and the reverberations across generations, but the film is carried by the performances of its leads. It is hard to heal when the ground beneath you remains unsteady.