Maxine Peake and Tom Vaughan-Lawlor in FX's Say Nothing.Disney+
Three years ago, filmmaker Maya Bastian met with an explosive response to her short Tigress. Bastian, like me, is Tamil-Canadian. Her film, a rumination on what it’s like being born in the conflict zone that led hundreds of thousands of us to flee to Canada, was premiering at the Reel Asian Film Festival before it landed on CBC Gem. Our community responded strongly to the film, which depicts a female fighter for the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam who, it is suggested, was taken from her home and forced into the war.
The film’s defenders appreciated its nuance in addressing war crimes committed by the Tigers that prompted some Tamils to distance themselves from the rebels. Detractors suggested that by acknowledging atrocities on both sides, the film created a false equivalency between the Tigers, whom Canada labelled a terrorist group, and the Sri Lankan government, which Canada has deemed responsible for genocide. Here’s the thing about dredging up these experiences: When the underlying issues are left unresolved, the many wounds scabbed over but unhealed, and the narrative of it all is the only thing left to fight over in a divided and traumatized community, you’ll trigger furious responses.
I would expect the same when it comes to Say Nothing, yet another story about women taking up arms in a rebellion. The thrilling and uneasy new series dives into a very different conflict, adapting Patrick Radden Keefe’s historical true crime book about the Troubles in Northern Ireland. And yet its autopsy on resistance – capturing the oppression that spawns it, the righteousness and seductiveness that draw people to it, the time it takes for all the violence, trauma and moral compromises to curdle and fester into some form of ideological defeat – will feel intimate to anyone born in proximity to such uprisings, whether in Belfast, Johannesburg, Eelam or Gaza.
Unlike a short like Tigress, Say Nothing, a taut, nine-part series that spans four decades, has the space to be in-depth and rigorous. I can’t think of another film or series that interrogates what it means to come from an embattled community whose heroes are labelled terrorists and juggles the competing perspectives and emotions quite like this – not with its scope and empathy at least.
Like Keefe’s bestseller, the series hangs on a central tragedy. In 1972, the IRA “disappeared” Jean McConville, a mother of 10 whom the organization accused of working as an informant for the British. The investigation into her fate frames Keefe’s fact-based reconstruction of the conflict, which he largely explores through a few key IRA figures. They include Dolours and Marian Price, the sisters behind the 1973 Old Bailey bombing; Brandon Hughes, the commanding officer of the Belfast Brigade and the organizer behind the Bloody Friday bombing campaign; and politician Gerry Adams, who claims he had nothing to do with the IRA. Every Say Nothing episode, in which Adams is depicted as a chief tactician and leader, ends with mounting disclaimers reciting his denials.
Dolours (played magnificently during her younger years by Lola Petticrew) is our way into the story. We meet her and her sister (Hazel Doupe) as they march in a protest, their non-violent approach met with batons to the head. Soon they follow their own father’s footsteps into the IRA, becoming the first women to join the very patriarchal organization and test its boundaries.
There’s a propulsive sexiness to these early episodes, as Dolours and Marian use their gender to their advantage, catching people off guard when they pull up to a heist dressed as nuns, flirting their way through military checkpoints in vehicles carrying explosives and graduating to plotting missions as part of a special unit alongside Hughes and overseen by Adams. You can’t really shake the shameless excitement hard-wired into these depictions of shootouts and chases. If Say Nothing occasionally feels too slickly packaged, rest assured its contents won’t go down easy.
There’s a narcissism to these characters, a sense of romance in their radicalism that eventually makes them lose sight of why they’re fighting. As the show goes on, it chips away at the righteousness fuelling the action, just slowly enough that you can argue over what point these characters cross a moral or ideological red line. Adams, for instance – played with a chess master’s cool by Josh Finan – makes a convincing case for why the IRA must have a zero-tolerance policy toward informants (whom they refer to as “touts”). That doesn’t take away from the weight of the first execution. And things just get increasingly murky and unsettling as their story catches up to McConville.
Say Nothing settles in discomfort, as Dolours (who is played in her older years by Maxine Peake) grapples with her sacrifice – what, if anything, was gained and at what cost. The soul searching in its final stretch reminds of Steven Spielberg’s Munich and Martin Scorsese’s gangster opus The Irishman.
It’s these final episodes that illuminate the show’s expert craftsmanship, the way it weaves between competing perspectives and combative emotions and tries to do justice to a story that may never find just that. It reveals how some people are still fighting over this narrative, especially because the cause has been lost.
All episodes of Say Nothing began streaming on Disney Plus Canada on Nov. 14.