"You can get away with anything in Ireland if you're funny," says Patrick McCabe, novelist and coscreenwriter of this vivid, grimly witty foray into childhood fantasy and budding psychosis. Seemingly operating on this principle, protagonist Francie Brady (fiercely expressive newcomer Eamonn Owens) narrates the story of his early-1960s Irish adolescence with relentless good cheer; describing his increasingly gruesome mischief, our horrifically chummy hero becomes a nightmare version of the stereotypical Irish raconteur. The subjective world of the film is peopled with such spectral conventions: the alcoholic, defeated father (Stephen Rea, ever the icon of ineffectual Irish manhood), the lecherous priest, the interfering matron, the garrulous town drunk (a sly cameo by writer McCabe). Interestingly, Francie's imagination is also thoroughly saturated with American popular culture: his fantasies amalgamate Catholic iconography (including a startlingly radiant Sinéad O'Connor as the Virgin Mary) and Cold War science fiction, and the political strife feeding his paranoia is not the Troubles, but the Bay of Pigs.-Juliet Clark