‘Baite’ review: Conventional murder mystery unfolds in 1970s Ireland

Dir: Ruan Magan. Ireland. 2025. 94mins

The settled calm of a rural community is shattered by the discovery of a long-hidden body in Baite. Ruan Magan’s Irish-language debut feature serves up a mixture of murder mystery and family drama in which the events of the past haunt the present. Sheena Lambert has adapted her 2015 novel The Lake for the screen, and the familiar nature of the plotting and conventional execution suggest a future more tailored to home viewing than theatrical following a world premiere at Galway.

Watchable without ever becoming truly gripping

A long-established director of shorts, television series and documentaries (The Flourishing, Steps Of Freedom), Magan succumbs to cliché from the start as he opens the film with drone shots of County Galway’s verdant, picturesque countryside, set to a score of plaintive strings and ethereal voices. This approach lacks a distinctive edge, and signals a film that will seem entirely at home among the many similar offerings available on television and streaming services.  

Baite is set in the late summer of 1975 in Glanaphuca, a sleepy backwater where ‘nothing interesting happens’ – until the discovery of a body and the arrival of Dublin-based detective Frank Ryan (a laconic, subdued Moe Dunford). At the heart of this local community is Peggy Casey (Eleanor O’Brien), who runs the local pub and  boasts proudly that it offers ”the best bar menu in the county”. She takes her daily swim in a man-made lake that covers the remnants of an old village and its cemetery. A prolonged dry season has lowered water levels and two visiting anglers discover a female body, preserved in the silt. There is a collective determination to conclude this must be a body from the old cemetery. Ryan arrives to establish the truth.

In best Agatha Christie tradition, Baite depicts a small community full of shifty individuals with something to hide – although you do long for the eccentricity of a Bruno Dumont world, just to lend it some flavour. Peggy seems particularly jittery and overwrought, worried about the impact on her beloved pub at a time when it already feels under threat. Her siblings are convinced the time has come to sell the family business and move on with their lives. Her sister Carla (Fionnuala Gygax) wants to leave for Australia, brother Jerome (Mark MacGearailt) is seeking a fresh start in Dublin with his partner, and oldest brother Hugo (Gearoid Kavanagh) is already a successful businessman in London. The fate of the pub runs in parallel with a murder investigation that inevitably opens old wounds and spills guilty secrets.

First and foremost a murder mystery, Lambert’s screenplay finds traces of wry humour in the casual sexism of the period and the competence of a local police force that consists of one garda and a telephone that does not work. There is an empathy with those who feel trapped by old-school attitudes and long for the liberties of city life. The acknowledgement of social and cultural pressures adds some heft to a less subtle surface story that feels obliged to push Peggy and Frank towards a vague, unconvincing romance.

A series of flashbacks link the story to a time when the original village was flooded and help to fill in the blanks about the dead woman and her place in the community’s history. Yet Baite is rather too neat and tidy in the way it ties up all the loose ends, leaving a film that is watchable without ever becoming truly gripping.