Rundale

Rory Rowan

Eva Richardson McCrea’s new film The Decameron / Na Deich Lá (2025, 66 minutes), on show at Dublin’s Project Arts Centre until April 5th, finds its place amidst a growing body of work by Irish artists circling the housing crisis. Whilst video and installation works such as Avril Corroon’s Got Damp (2023) and The Land Question (2020) and Romantic Ireland (2024) by Eimear Walshe tarry with the conditions for, and impact of, that crisis head on, Richardson McCrea’s work adopts a more oblique but no less trenchant approach. Of particular note here is the work of Sara Greavu, Curator of Visual Arts at Project, who has been pivotal in creating the intellectual and institutional space for artists critically engaged with housing. In 2022 Greavu screened one of Richardson McCrea’s earlier films, Rope (2022),as part of Clear Away the Rubble / Glan an Spallaí ar Shiúl, which turned Project’s gallery space over to artists, researchers, and CATU activists to discuss the nature of the current crisis and what lessons might be learned from Ireland’s historical housing struggles.

Decameron / Na Deich Lá is not concerned with illustrating the political economy of the housing crisis but rather turns its attention to the forms of social relation and subjectivity produced when rental housing becomes a site for capitalist accumulation rather a means for providing homes. It asks what hyper commodified housing and a lack of agency over who we live with and how does to our ability to relate to each other, and ourselves.

‘Do You Have Connection?’

One of the film’s opening scenes features two characters in a beige living area that resembles the lobby of a boutique capsule hotel. One character tries to read quietly on a never-used-before couch. The other fidgets distractedly with an arbitrary assortment of musical instruments strewn across a largely empty shelf on the opposite side of the room. Desperate to escape their awkward proximity he turns on a radio, unleashing a prolonged blast of football commentary that makes the reader glance up from her magazine. “Do you play anything?” he asks, tapping distractedly at a plastic bodhrán. “A couple of things.” [painful silence].” Do you?” “I did a couple of lessons but then – then I quit.” I think I’d have been good if I practiced though.” [painful silence]. “They say you are less likely to get dementia if you play an instrument.” The conversation sputters out before it has even begun. They tacitly agree to drop it and return to an uncomfortable self-conscious hush. 

At turns hilarious and heartbreaking, The Decameron / Na Deich Lá revolves around a group of young people imprisoned by circumstance (and perhaps aspiration) in a co-living complex struggling to make connection with each other. The film’s action, such as it is, concerns several excruciatingly awkward and protracted attempts by pairs or trios of characters to relate to one another, all of them unsuccessful, before a much-anticipated party brings them together into a stilted approximation of socialising.

A tense yearning for connection drives the film’s narrative but it remains largely elusive. The script was workshopped through character-based improvision with the actors, a method which gives scenes an uneasy indeterminacy reminiscent of John Cassavetes’ films. Minor tentative interactions are stretched out in the quietly anguished discomfort of people unable to reach each other emotionally across the expanse of an IKEA coffee table.

These tense little tragi-comic melodramas are best understood when located in the long psychological shadow of the housing crisis. By extending and amplifying the characters’ failure to relate the film allows the audience to dwell on the emotional experience of enforced cohabitation and the alienated, anxious subjects it produces.    

Although quite abstract the film’s meaning is clear when viewed from the affective wake of decades of neoliberal housing policy, which finds expression in record levels of homelessness on the one hand and vulture funds investing in so-called ‘co-living’ complexes on the other. The latter serve as a subject and setting for The Decameron / Na Deich Lá.

The film was shot surreptitiously by Richardson McCrea and cinematographer Anthony O’Connor in a Dublin co-living complex over several weeks in 2024, during which time arts funding supported the artist as a paying tenant. The cast of ten actors were smuggled in to shoot scenes in the building’s almost clichédly sterile common areas. Shooting took place three days a week and at no point does any other tenant enter the frame – indication enough of just how much co- there is in co-living.

‘Money Flows Endlessly into Me’

A far cry from the utopian experiments in collective living that their marketing schtick sometimes evokes, co-living spaces rather suggest rentier non-places inimical to common life – an architectural form colonising the void left by neoliberalism’s systematic evacuation of collectivity. Richardson McCrea’s film delves into the gap between co-living’s promise of a ‘convivial’ escape from loneliness and the reality of spaces designed to extract maximum profit by skirting planning regulations and taking advantage of tenants affluent (and possibly still desperate) enough to pay searingly high rents for rooms as small as a ‘parking space.’

By lingering on the blank brochure-ready ‘common spaces’ the film provokes an uncanny sense that it is the building itself that thwarts the characters’ attempts to relate to one another – at once confining them together and holding them apart. These common areas don’t offer a space for gathering so much as a space of surveillance that militates against the very sociability co-living promises. This feeling is intensified by repeated shots of the long dark hallways lined with doors into residents’ bedrooms, evoking a residential institution as much as a hotel.

‘Chill Vibes’

While recently packing up my belongings to move from one rental house to another, I listened to an interview with the American psychologist Jonathan Haidt on RTÉ. Haidt expounded the thesis of his influential 2024 book, The Anxious Generation: how the great rewiring of childhood is causing an epidemic of mental illness, that in the last 15 years the English speaking world has seen an enormous increase in the instances of childhood anxiety and depression. The cause, Haidt claims, is smart phones (iPhone, 2007) and social media (Facebook, 2004). According to him no other factor could have had this effect on youth mental health during this period.

However, what Haidt stringently excludes from consideration, as William Davies noted in a recent review of his book in the London Review of Books, is the 2007-8 financial crisis and its aftermath, i.e., austerity, the exploding cost of education and housing, and the normalization of precarious employment, all of which have resulted in a steep rise in socio-economic inequality and insecurity. Doubtless Haidt is right that smart phones and social media have impacted the mental wellbeing of those who have grown up with them. However, any account of youth anxiety and depression that excludes the fundamental ‘rewiring’ of capitalist social relations in this period – not least in the domain of housing – seems determined to avoid the obvious.

Some facts:

At the end of January, the Central Statistics Office (CSO) released the results of a major new survey, which found that almost 70% of 25-year-olds live in their family home. A further 12.7% of those interviewed had emigrated.

A report published in April 2024 by the National Youth Council of Ireland (NYCI) provided compelling evidence for the correlation between the housing crisis and the mental health crises amongst young people. The report found that housing was the most pressing concern for 67% of 18-to 29-year-olds. Nearly half (48%) reported they were unhappy with their housing arrangement and that this had negatively impacted their “mental well-being.” One third reported rarely or never feeling optimistic about their future.

Spunout, a charity focused on youth mental health in Ireland, released their own report the following month. There 4 out of 5 16-to 24-year-olds surveyed agreed that the housing crisis was “significantly negatively impacting their mental health.”

The profound changes to government spending, tax policy, employment legislation, and banking regulation that were pushed through in the wake of the financial crisis, in Ireland as elsewhere, laid waste to the economic basis of ‘a normal life.’ Yet, there has been little shift in expectations around what said life should look like. This has left many of us not only with a profound sense of uncertainty regarding our future, but also the feeling that this uncertainty is our own fault. We exist within, what the late Laurent Berlant called, a “cruel optimism” particular to our moment, where identities and expectations remain attached to forms of security and progress painfully out-of-sink with material conditions.

Richardson McCrea’s film plays out the psycho-social dynamics between those for whom the promise of a better future appears foreclosed. It is no surprise that the rooms where it was shot strikingly resemble waiting rooms, complete with a random selection of reading material to distract from boredom and foreboding. The housing arrangements depicted, like so much rental accommodation in Ireland, is designed to be little more than a temporary holdover until an interminably deferred ‘adulthood’ can be afforded.

‘Don’t be Sad’

Much of the film’s dark humour is plumbed from the aspirational ideologies of self-actualization that contemporary capitalism offers as a sop for the agency and relationality it denies. Popular psychology tropes, self-help discourses, (weaponized) wellness proscriptions pepper the film, appearing as symptoms of – rather than answers to –alienation and failed relationality. In this regard the film dramatizes critiques of the wellness industry familiar to the Left, i.e., that these discourses and practices further the project of individuation, that is itself responsible for so many of the mental health struggles faced today. Yet the effects of individuation do not only concern individuals’ mental wellbeing but have much broader political consequences. 

Our political and media institutions, popular culture, and higher education system too often counsel that radical progressive social and political change is impossible, or at least dangerous. Yet the dire need for change is ever more apparent. The wellness industry promotes the self as the only viable site of change, channeling pent up desires for social system change into programmes of personal betterment and the purging of bodily toxins.

Indeed, in the final scene of the film one character cleans up another’s vomit, in one of the only acts of mutuality depicted. This act of care offers a redemptive glimpse into mutual aid’s capacity to build worlds beyond the cul-de-sac of individuation (whilst touchingly refusing the body shaming that the wellness industry often profits from).

This is not a film made in the service of a political programme or as a tool of political education, but it raises questions about the subjective impacts of material conditions. It usefully allows the housing crisis to be seen from the perspective of a much wider crisis of contemporary subjectivity. In one scene in the film two characters struggling to find connection find fleeting common ground in agreeing they don’t really believe in aliens. One of them solemnly concludes that “there are better things to believe in.” “Like love,” the other responds. “Yeah, like love.” Richardson McCrea’s film underlines the critical importance of collectively reconstructing the belief in better things.