The Jealous God (12A)
- Consumer Advice: Contains moderate sex and language
- Run time: 1 hour 35 mins
- Genre: Drama
- Release date: 9th September 2005
- Starring: Jason Merrells, Denise Welch, Mairead Carty
- Directed by: Steven Woodcock
- Distributor: North Country Pictures
Plot Synopsis
An industrial town in Yorkshire during the mid-1960s.
Vincent Dungarven's mother wants him to be a Roman Catholic priest and he half thinks that he has the vocation. He is a reserved young man, a schoolmaster, and at thirty has never been in love.
One day he visits the local library and encounters Laura, a new librarian. Fascinated by her beauty and charm, he overcomes his shyness and asks her out. She accepts and soon he falls passionately in love with her, for although she is a Protestant – which creates tensions for Vincent at home – she is everything he has longed for but never found.
Vincent has two older brothers and both of them are married with children. Matthew is a manager at a mill and Paul is a solicitor. Matthew has a drink problem and his wife Maureen is frustrated and unhappy. She has desires for Vincent but when he brings Matthew home drunk late one night, after they have been out to the pub, he resists her sexual provocation.
Vincent continues to see Laura and at a wedding she is introduced to his mother; but during a talk with Paul at the reception afterwards, he realizes that all is not what it seems, and the rest of his family has been talking behind his back. Not long after, while he is waiting for a train, Vincent encounters Laura’s eccentric flat mate Ruth, who makes a devastating revelation about Laura’s personal life that shatters everything for him. Now, in a moment of terrible weakness, he commits the ultimate sin. As John Braine wrote in the original novel, by the time of this turning-point in the story:
“He had deliberately denied himself the one pleasure that had the power to transform his very notion of pleasure; he had committed all the other sins because of indolence or indifference, never stopping to calculate the price.”
As the twists of fate intensify and his dilemma grows, Vincent finds living with his mother intolerable. When it is too late ever to recover his old detachment, he discovers that unless he is prepared to break away from his church, he cannot cross the emotional barrier that stands between Laura and himself. By the time the film reaches its emotionally-charged climax, he finds his world has been shaken to its foundation in the pursuit of passionate love, and another man's life has been destroyed so that he can get it.