While it's impossible not to recognise the yearning in this screen adaptation of Brian Friel's stageplay, the demand for director John Quested's sad depiction of faded lives in a sodden Donegal of the '70s can hardly be massive.
Still, it's a vivid if maudlin piece, as Donal McCann, in the company of alter ego Des Cave (a theatrical device to provide us with his more interior monologues), contemplates his life on the eve of emigration to America.
What he reveals has ever been the stuff of Irish literature: misery, guilt and heartbreak.