Trad review: Irish music and the open road carry a warm new cinema story

There is a particular risk in making a film about Irish traditional music. Push too hard and it becomes postcard culture. Hold back too much and the music loses the force that makes people follow it from kitchen sessions to fleadh stages and late-night pubs. Trad finds a useful middle ground. It understands that the music is not only sound. It is inheritance, pressure, pride, rebellion and sometimes a burden placed on young shoulders before they know whether they want it.

Lance Daly’s film follows Shóna McAnally, a gifted young fiddle player from the Donegal Gaeltacht, who is conflicted about her talent and the expectations surrounding it. She takes to the road with her younger brother Mickey and a troupe of travelling musicians, moving across the country in a story built around adventure, romance and musical discovery. The film is written and directed by Daly, runs 90 minutes, and is listed as an Irish 2025 production. It won the Audience Award at the 2025 Galway Film Fleadh.

That audience award is not surprising. Trad has the shape of a crowd-pleaser, but not in a shallow way. It has music, movement, youth, conflict and a central character trying to decide whether the gift everyone praises is actually hers to choose. The film is warm, but it is not weightless. Beneath the road-movie ease is a familiar Irish question: what happens when tradition is both a shelter and a cage?

Shóna is the film’s centre, and the story works because her restlessness feels recognisable. She is not rejecting the music because she lacks talent. She is pushing against the way talent can become a public identity before it becomes a private joy. In communities where culture is cherished, young people can sometimes feel they are expected to carry more than music. They are asked to carry language, locality, family pride and communal memory. Trad is at its best when it lets Shóna wrestle with that without turning her into a simple rebel.

The decision to put her on the road is a smart one. A film set entirely around competitions, rehearsals and family arguments might have become too narrow. The journey opens the story out. It lets the music breathe in different settings and gives Shóna space to meet people who understand tradition differently. Music in Trad is not locked in a classroom or preserved behind glass. It travels. It gets argued over. It changes depending on who is playing and who is listening.

The presence of Mickey, her younger brother, gives the story its gentler rhythm. He is not simply there to soften Shóna. He reminds the audience that family ties can be irritating and protective at the same time. Their relationship gives the road trip its emotional stakes. The journey is not only about escape. It is about who gets carried along when one person decides to leave.

Daly has always been interested in young people finding their way through difficult emotional landscapes. Here, he gives the story a lighter surface, but the instincts are still serious. Trad is about growing up inside a culture that loves you but also watches you. The film does not mock that culture. It respects it. But it also allows a young woman to ask whether respect has to mean obedience.

The music is naturally the film’s heartbeat. A film like this cannot treat traditional music as background decoration. It has to feel lived-in. The best passages understand that a tune can change the mood of a room faster than dialogue. It can start as performance and become confession. It can be a challenge, a flirtation, a memory or a way of saying what a character cannot put into speech.

The wider cast helps the film avoid feeling too tightly wrapped around one character. IFTA has described Trad as introducing rising Irish stars Megan Nic Fhionnghaile and Cathal Coade Palmer, with a supporting cast including Aidan Gillen, Sarah Greene, Peter Coonan and Ann Skelly. That mix matters because the story needs both youthful energy and older pressure. The younger performers bring movement and uncertainty. The established actors bring the sense of a world already shaped by expectations.

What makes Trad appealing is that it does not treat tradition as a museum piece. It sees it as something argued into the present. For some characters, music is discipline. For others, it is freedom. For others again, it is status, memory, comfort or performance. Shóna’s journey works because she has to discover where she stands among all those meanings.

There are moments where the film’s warmth may feel a little too easy. The road-movie format can make conflict pass quickly, and some turns in the story have the open-hearted neatness of a film designed to leave audiences smiling. But that is not necessarily a weakness. Trad is not trying to be a severe portrait of cultural inheritance. It is trying to be generous, musical and alive to the confusion of youth.

The Donegal Gaeltacht setting gives the film another layer. This is not simply an Irish story in a vague national sense. It comes from a place where music, language and community carry particular weight. That gives Shóna’s conflict more force. Her question is not just whether she wants to play the fiddle. It is whether she can belong to a tradition without being owned by it.

As a Movies Desk pick, Trad is valuable because it gives Irish audiences something that feels culturally close without becoming sentimental. It is a film about music, but also about agency. It asks whether young people can inherit something beautiful and still be allowed to reshape it.

The answer, at least in the spirit of the film, is yes. Tradition survives not because everyone repeats it perfectly, but because each generation finds a way to make it speak again.

Verdict
Trad is a warm, music-filled Irish road movie with a strong sense of place and a generous understanding of youth, talent and cultural inheritance. It may follow some familiar emotional beats, but its energy, music and Donegal-rooted story give it real charm.

Rating
3.5 / 5