As Far As You've Come

The film opens in a club, the camera easing in an out of focus on the movement of dancers. At the bar, Billy (Bryan Larkin) and Andy (John Paul Hurley) Frankie are drinking, dragging on their ciggies, not yet comatose, but definitely on the slide.

With the sky clean and fresh in the dawn light, they shuffle home along the canal. Under a bridge, amongst garbage and broken bits of household furniture, a man (David McKay) is lying face upwards. He looks dead.

For the briefest of moments, Billy hesitates, as if wondering whether to walk on, not get involved, leave the sod in his own filth. He stoops down and wakes the man. Blood seeps from his mouth.

“Any drink, man?” he croaks. “Any fags?”

While Frankie wanders off to get help, although looking at him you doubt his ability to find his own shoelaces, Billy stays with the man, who has a wound in his chest, possibly from a gunshot. They talk, or at least try, but it’s hard. The man fights for breath.

Writer/director Vincent Hunter stays close to his actors, who respond magnificently. The mood is dark, the emotions muted. Truth can never be forced, only respected, and that is what this is, what Hunter does, with admirable control.

One mystery remains. Why the title? What does it mean? It is too easily forgotten, which is not what Hunter wants with one of the best short films of the year so far.