Quirke (2014)

This is one of the few movies I've ever seen where the whole audience broke into spontaneous, loud applause a third of the way in.

After playing with our expectations, this turns out to be a very different sort of film.

The film may be flawed, but its message is not.

By the time the dramatic fireworks start popping off, each one feels earned.

The new BBC drama 'Quirke' takes us into postwar Ireland - seedy, drunken, dominated by the twin evils of the church and the wealthy and corrupt. It's a somewhat clichéd view, made palatable by the series' muted tone, although at times in the first episode I struggled to follow the softly spoken dialogue and relatively (for a murder drama) understated plot. Unlike many such series, there's an overall narrative as well as individual stories; the fact that Quirke's niece has a separate, personal connection to all three murders reduces the overall plausibility. The cast is an impressive one, but the scripts don't really call on them to do anything extraordinary; the detail with which their characters' feelings are observed is often weaker than its symbolic depiction (endless booze and cigarettes). To me, 'Quirke' fell between two stools: too low-key and gloomy to be fun family entertainment, but not truly deep either.

How low is the lowest common denominator in this. John Banville seemed to me to be a writer of Ireland past and present that you might learn something from. Holy mother of God, Quirke is terrible. I've never seen such a transparent plot line, such poor and shallow acting from stellar marquee names, so many faux hospital passes. Can I write the next episode - just gotta check Wikipedia for some autopsy references and come up with a 'startling' revelation regarding a hard drinking long lost relative of some sort or the other and then mix it up with production values ranging from low to medium allied with an occasional exotic non-1950's sounding name and they're ye are Quirke , working title Dublin Dud.

Honestly I do not know they expect to get viewers on a regular basis with only 3 episodes? It did not play like a mini series or long movie. Was it suppose to? It is well done. Different and interesting. The acting was good. But I was sure this was a TV series. Three episodes does not make a TV series. I guess it was not meant to be more. This is from Wiki. Quirke is a British-Irish crime drama television series that was first broadcast on BBC One and RTÉ One in 2014. The three-part series is based on the books by John Banville, writing under the pseudonym Benjamin Black, and was adapted by Andrew Davies and Conor McPherson. I would like to see them actually turn this into a real series.

I kept watching, just hoping it would get better. Three A-list principals, it just has to be good, right? IMHO, the writing was on par with a Quincey MD episode, the acting was either forced or flat, and the writing, editing, and directing abrupt. Just because it had the atmosphere of Foyle's War or The Bletchley Circle did not make it so. Glamour and style do not make up for a lack of substance. There were so many blatantly obvious hints about the "event which might be considered by some a twist" that by the time it arrived all I could say was "well duh-UH!" In fact, twist is too strong a term, as is reveal. Think of this as being on the opposite end of the spectrum from an Inspector Morse.