Say Nothing Review: FX’s Gripping IRA Drama is Both Heartfelt and Horrifying

FX’s latest historical drama may be called Say Nothing, but make no mistake, this excellent series has plenty to say. 

Based on the 2018 nonfiction book of the same name by journalist Patrick Radden Keefe, the series is the latest triumphant entry in a banner year of programming for the cable network that includes Shogun and English Teacher. It’s occasionally uncomfortable but deeply honest and necessary viewing, a series that deftly juggles the complexity of historical truth and mythmaking alongside questions that have no easy answers.

Say Nothing is one part history lesson, one part tragedy, one part full-throated excoriation of systemic oppression, one part meditation on the psychological trauma of political violence, and one part lyrical ode to those who lost their lives during the decades-long period known colloquially as the Troubles.

It’s a story that contains—and serves—multitudes, and the combination of a dual-timeline plot,  frequently competing perspectives, and morally gray characters probably shouldn’t work at all.

Yet,  the show manages to handle its potentially controversial subject matter with grace and no small amount of heart, refusing to cast any of its characters as outright heroes or villains. Rather, it’s a story of the myriad ways pursuing the course of action you feel is right can lead to committing some fairly indefensible wrongs.

Say Nothing deliberately doesn’t make things easy for its audience, forcing viewers to sit with the thorny and uncomfortable paradoxes at the center of the questions it asks. The end result is riveting television and that feels almost painfully timely, given our current, well, everything. 

The story follows several members of the Provisional Irish Republican Army in Belfast over the decades-long period of violent conflict, as paramilitary forces and soldiers frequently clashed in British-controlled Northern Ireland. The nine episodes (all of which were available for review) primarily focus on the story of sisters Dolours (Lola Petticrew) and Marian (Hazel Doupe) Price.

Growing up in a fiercely Irish republican household, with a father who regaled his family with stories about going to prison for “the Cause” and a mother who buried guns in the backyard garden, it’s unsurprising both girls are itching to join in the fight for themselves as soon as possible.

Not content with rolling bandages or stashing guns, Dolours and Marian long to be on the front lines alongside well-known men like Brendan “The Dark” Hughes (Anthony Boyle) and Gerry Adams (Josh Finan). The sisters ultimately convince their superiors to let them take part in the fighting for real, and quickly rise through the ranks of Belfast IRA soldiers thanks to their daring and attention-grabbing operations.

The series’ earliest episodes treat the Price sisters’ escapades with an edgy flair, backed with a rock ‘n roll soundtrack and plenty of kickass attitudes as they rob banks wearing nuns’ habits and flirt their way through border crossings with explosives hidden in the side panels of their car.

But as the years pass and the allure of being a “freedom fighter” begins to dim, Dolours must repeatedly convince herself that what she’s doing has value. 

Woven through and around Dolours’s story is that of the 1972 disappearance of Jean McConville (Judith Roddy), a single mother of ten who was abducted on suspicion of being an informant and never seen alive again. She is one of the group known as the Disappeared, those who were abducted, murdered, and secretly buried, presumably by IRA members or other Irish republicans.

Dolours, recruited to a unit allegedly overseen by Gerry Adams himself, becomes a driver who ferries many of these souls—-some she knows and is close to, others she doesn’t recognize—-to certain death across the border in Ireland.  

Gerry Adams has always denied being a member of the IRA or participating in any IRA-related violence. He also denies any involvement in the abduction of Jean McConville. Say Nothing runs a disclaimer to this effect at the end of every episode, which only becomes more darkly and wildly unbelievable as the series goes on. (Or, at least it did for this reviewer.) 

The series dual timeline format doesn’t always unfold in a straight line, frequently interspersing scenes of a young, defiant Dolours gleefully plotting the infamous bombing of London’s Old Bailey in 1973 as a means of taking the fight to the British with scenes of her older self (played by Maxine Peake) painfully recounting her various misdeeds to the Belfast Project — an oral history series about the Troubles that promised not to release any of its interviews until after its participants’ deaths.

While the juxtaposition of these segments may seem tonally awkward or narratively convenient at first, the final product is profoundly mournful and complex.

As Dolours—and Hughes, who also took part in the project and is played in later life by Tom Vaughan-Lawlor — reflect on the ways their communal belief system failed them and how they came to question the point of the work they once found so necessary, is quietly devastating.

The code of the IRA was one of silence. Its members were, as the title of this series implies, to say nothing about the group’s membership, crimes, or other actions, and to ignore the terror the IRA occasionally might visit upon its own people. 

But that silence comes at a cost. And Say Nothing doesn’t skimp on depicting the horrors that result, from the beautifully shot scenes of condemned informants kneeling beside their own open graves to Dolours and Marian’s torturous 208-day hunger strike in a prison where they’re violently force-fed by their jailers. 

Brendan’s growing discontent with his idol Gerry, who disavows his IRA connections in the name of securing his own political future is but one of the many complicated moments of reckoning, and the tension between ideology and disillusionment drives much of the back half of the series.

Some, like Dolours, feel compelled to pay some sort of penance for their actions, even if only in the form of a long-withheld confession. Marian, for her part, doubles down on her dreams of fitting for a unified Ireland. 

The cast is all-around top-notch. Petticrew is as fierce and fiery as the young Dolours, while Peake believably embraces the disappointed cynicism of an older woman who wonders whether she’s wasted her life on a lost cause.

Doupe’s performance is more subtle—and perhaps even more impressive—as Marian, who is both more fanatical and more dangerous than her sister, and a great deal better at hiding both.

Boyle boasts impressive swagger and a banger of a mustache, while Finan’s performance walks a fine line between fervid true believer and “desperately needs a solid punch in the face”. 

Even actors in smaller roles — Rory Kinnear as a snobbish British counterinsurgency strategist, Laura Donnelly as Jean McConville’s emotionally numb adult daughter, Paddy Towers as an overly full of himself teenage IRA member —- knock it out of the park. 

Say Nothing isn’t always an easy watch — nor does it offer any easy answers. Peace is achieved after decades of loss and bloodshed, but to what real end? And at what cost? Ireland remains divided, and the dead are still gone. B

But it’s the show’s decision to use McConville’s story to ground its exploration of ideology, belief, and political violence that gives Say Nothing its strongest thematic punch, highlighting the human cost of the Troubles, and centering the victims of the conflict as thoroughly as it does any of the people who were responsible for its violence. And that’s not a small thing.

Say Nothing premieres Thursday, November 14 on FX on Hulu.

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