Muiris Crowley | Change in the Weather / 2015

the film that resists telling its tale

by Douglas Messerli

 

Muiris Crowley (screenwriter and director) Change in the Weather / 2015 [16 minutes]

 

Irish writer/director Muiris Crowley’s short film Change in the Weather almost resists telling its story. But who can blame Crowley for keeping it almost a secret for such a long time, focusing  instead upon what seems like normal actions, even when we know that something else is going on.

   The film begins with the teacher Michael (Crowley) putting up the student’s desk and erasing the teaching board at the end of a day. He drives to what appears to be a practice session for young soccer students, he doing exercises on the sideline before driving off into the night.

     In the very next frame, he is eating dinner with his parents, whom this late 20-year-old or man in his early 30s man obviously still lives.

     The next scene seems equally banal, as he rises in the morning, shaves, showers, and dresses before returning to the school, where we discover that he’s evidently tutoring only one slow learner (Brian O’Donoghue), whose father (Joe Mullins) picks him up after class and asks about his progress. Michael assures him that he’s “coming along.”

      We see Michael again later in the day at a local pub, and once more, presumably after, driving along in dark roads. But this time we get a far more revelatory scene as we see him stop at an isolated country spot where another car is also parked. And soon after in the back seat of the vehicle he is fucking another male.

       So we can presume that Michael is a gay man, living what the IMDb “handle” describes as a “furtive lifestyle.” He washes his shoes of the mud clearly accumulated from the country spot.

       The next day he attends a soccer game with his Da, anxious to check his cellphone. And again that night, he drives to the isolated place for sex.

       It is the next morning, probably a weekend, when he shops at a nearby convenience store. But here things begin to make terrible sense, as he encounters his student’s father once again, who this time approaches him menacingly, telling him to “To keep the fuck away from my son.” And what we suddenly realize, scrolling back through our bank of visual memories, is that in those trips to the country make-out spot, that the person he met up with was the boy he is tutoring.

     The rest of the film consists of Michael beginning to perceive the consequences of his acts: a drive to the ocean with his father where he enters the cold waters, quiet moments of pondering in the family kitchen, sighs, and the discovery that someone has written the word “queer” on the window of his car.

        He takes another trip to the ocean, floating on the surface of the water like a dead man. And after, a telephone call that expresses his sentiment that he “can’t do this anymore.”

        Michael makes yet one more trip to the country meet-up spot, but turns around without participating in sex. He returns home, sits up is bed mulling over everything that has happened,

stands up and goes to his parent’s bedroom to confess, as he breaks down in tears.

        We don’t know precisely what he tells them, but it is surely in preparation for a possible public outing and revelation of his behavior. We don’t know the boy’s age. Since he is studying in the summer, he may be attempting to graduate after his peers have, which may make him of legal age, which in Ireland, is 18 to engage in sex with anyone in a position of authority. But he doesn’t look to be 18, and he may still be of the legal age of consent at 17, but in which case Michael is still culpable. It doesn’t matter. Michael’s obvious guilt and the student’s father’s threats make it clear that the teacher has been in the wrong.

 

Los Angeles, September 13, 2025

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (September 2025).