Scotland on Screen: Sean Lìonadh on Too Rough

Too Rough, the latest short film from 24-year-old Glasgow filmmaker, poet and musician Sean Lìonadh, is a small-scale juggernaut. Since its world premiere at Sydney’s Flickerfest in January, the film has toured dozens of festivals around the world, including SXSW in Austin, London’s Flare festival and a hometown screening at Glasgow Short Film Festival, where it won the Audience Award. Other prizes followed – 16 in total – including accolades at ASPAC International Social Film Festival in France, the Radio City International Short Film Festival in Spain and the Scottish Mental Health Arts Festival.

The film is a spiky but tender story following Nick, a young gay, closeted, working-class teen, who's going through a morning of crisis. After a boozy night at a boujee house party in Glasgow’s West End where Nick “doesn’t feel gay enough” to be there, some Dutch courage compels him to invite his boyfriend, Charlie, who’s much more comfortable with his sexuality, back to his bedroom at his parents' house. When the hungover pair wake up the next morning, they're in Nick’s single bed, the sun is already blasting through the net curtains and his parents are up and about. Nick panics. The pair are trapped.

The film prickles with raw details, many of them taken from Lìonadh's own life, including the delicious setup. “I had to sneak a boyfriend out of my bedroom once and it was quite farcical looking back. We were running up and down the stairs like some comedy movie because we kept almost getting caught. But at the time it was very stressful and I became very angry at my boyfriend. I just thought that scenario of that one bedroom would be such a rich limitation to inspire all of these crazy things that happen.”

Over its 16-minute runtime, Too Rough is full of surprises. The initial premise suggests Nick’s anxiety is that his same-sex overnight houseguest will become known to his parents. It transpires, however, that it's not his sexuality that’s the source of Nick’s shame. His dysfunctional homelife is the chief secret he’s been keeping from the world, and Charlie being exposed to it is Nick’s biggest fear. “I wanted to write about a character that was trying to hide a part of themselves from their boyfriend because they felt it was in some way unlovable,” explains Lìonadh.

Sean Lìonadh

Shame is a driving theme too in Lìonadh's earlier film Time for Love, a filmed poem exploring the kaleidoscope of calculations a gay man, played by Lionadh, has to make before kissing his boyfriend goodbye in public. “I just don't feel like I have a choice,” says Lìonadh when I ask why he’s drawn to that subject. “I don't really know how anyone else deals with their shame but I have to just invert it, otherwise I think it would kill me. Honestly! When I see characters who have the same flaws, it makes those flaws completely acceptable to me, because when you see those things in other people, you can actually love them and accept them a lot easier than you can yourself.”

Flawed characters are also much more interesting, of course. “Oh totally," says Lìonadh. "I love flawed people, and I love flawed characters. But for me, flaws, I've just always felt like I had to be perfect. That's probably my Catholic upbringing and feeling like I have to be morally and academically perfect. So I never really allowed flaws in myself but in writing, flaws are actually what make the story compelling. So when I'm writing, I take the shit that I literally hate about myself, and that becomes the gold in this fictional world.”

The aesthetic of Too Rough recalls Andrew Haigh's work, specifically his masterful Weekend, but the rough-hewn poetics and the intimate, hand-held camerawork also bring to mind filmmakers like Lynne Ramsay (whose name, incidentally, is emblazoned on the T-shirt Lìonadh is wearing when I speak to him over Zoom) and Andrea Arnold, whom he’s explicitly cited as a reference for Too Rough’s claustrophobic 4:3 aspect ratio framing. When I ask who he’s most influenced by, however, he doesn’t hesitate in naming Nick Cave, a fellow musician who’s also a filmmaker. “Nick Cave is probably my favourite artist because he walks that line between monstrosity and being an angel as well. He just vomits all of his deepest, darkest desires and thoughts into songs and I try to do the same.”

Lìonadh does something similar with Too Rough, which features its own monsters and angels. When we ask Lìonadh why he thinks it’s struck such a chord with people on its hugely successful festival run, he suggests it’s this balance that’s key. “I think the warmth of the relationship between Nick and Charlie, combined with the tension of the situation is what people are reacting to,” he says. “I think the tension cracks people open and makes them vulnerable, and then the warmth just comes in and holds them. That was the intention anyway.”

---

Filmography: Too Rough (2022), Silence (2020), Time for Love (2018), Social Circles (TV mini-series) (2017)
w: seanlionadh.com
I: @lion.adh

Too Rough screens as part of the opening night of Edinburgh Short Film Festival, Summerhall, 28 Oct
Lìonadh's debut EP, I Cannot Go On Reaching, is released 22 Oct