aka Puffball - The Devil's Eyeball,
Nicolas Roeg,
2007
Star Review
Nicolas Roeg brought us some of the strangest and most memorable films of the 1970s. His new offering, a low-budget adaptation of a Fay Weldon novel, is equally esoteric and is an absolute must for his fans.
Kelly Reilly plays an architect who has opted for a quiet life in the enchanting Irish countryside of county Monoghan. While renovating her dilapidated cottage there, she becomes pregnant. This riles the family next door, the mother of whom is desperate for a baby boy, and soon she is caught up in the mystical birth rites of this remote community as well as the target of fierce jealousy and suspicion. The Irish grandmother, a brilliant Rita Tushingham, is to all intents and purposes a witch, casting wicked spells on the pregnant woman and vowing to take her baby away.
Puffball has had a hard time of it from the critics but perhaps they’ve just forgotten how off-the-wall Roeg can be. This film triumphs in its oddness and the filming is beautiful. It also tells important lessons about lust, motherhood and birth.
Nicholas Roeg's first film in 15 years is a supernatural drama set amidst the rolling hills of the Irish countryside. Needing to escape the city and her demanding boss Lars (Donald Sutherland), young architect Liffrey (Kelly Reilly) and boyfriend Richard (Oscar Pearce) buy a cottage in the Irish hills to restore. The Tucker family, who lived there previously and have now moved to a nearby farm, soon make the couple uneasy, especially mother-of-three daughters Mabs (Miranda Richardson), who can't hide her desire to have a son. The atmosphere takes a turn for the worse when Liffrey announces she's pregnant, mainly because Mabs's mother Molly (Rita Tushingham) has been trying, through use of the black arts, to finally have her own grandson. Isolated in her pregnancy, Liffrey is soon surrounded by a family convinced that the baby she is carrying rightly belongs to Mabs.
