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SENSATION

By Tom HALL

Black comedy - Completed 2009

Sad sack farmer Donal Doogan meets ageing aging Aussie escort Kim. What starts as a soulless contract develops into a bittersweet love story.

- Year of production
- 2009
- Genres
- Black comedy
- Countries
- IRELAND
- Languages
- ENGLISH
- Budget
- 1 - 3 M$
- Director(s)
- Tom HALL
- Writer(s)
- Tom HALL
- Cast
- Domhnall GLEESON, Luanne GORDON, Patrick RYAN, Kelly CAMPBELL
- ISAN
- 0000-0004-47AD-0000-5-0000-0000-M
- EIDR
- 10.5240/29F7-7CAC-AE06-8B1E-04C0-8
- Producer(s)
- Katie HOLLY, Kieron WALSH
- Synopsis
- Sensation is a love story that starts out as a sex story. It is intended as a darkly comic adult drama about the degraded state of the contemporary imagination. The narrative is inspired by a true story.
  Sligo farmer Donal Doogan is twenty-six, less a man than a child growing older, he is dead to wonder, dulled to life, empty of kindness and boiling with lust. Donal Durkin spent his entire life as an outsider in his community, lusting after women but this affection never being reciprocated, and caring for his disabled father alone on the family farm. The death of his father ironically serves as a kind of liberation for Donal, from the responsibility for caring for his father, from the farm, from his life as he’s been forced to live it. And a financial liberation too. Sensation details the relationship between Donal and an aging Australian escort, Kim, whom Donal plucks up the courage to call following his fathers death. They begin as client and call-girl, evolve into genuine lovers, then business partners and finally co-defendants. It is a relationship based less on desire or mutual attraction than on urgent need. During the course of their encounters, which move from client and call girl to business partners, when they set up a brothel together, they give each other something no one else can, a sense of meaning and belonging, a way into a society that had hitherto shunned them. In this way the narrative touches on another new theme in Irish life. The corrupting effects of power on someone who’s never had any of either.
  Donal longs for love and meaning but settles for sex and status. He will come to realise that they’re not the same thing and will ultimately be faced with the prospect of betraying Kim to save himself. The question is, save himself for what?
- Beginning of shooting
- Jun 01, 2009