Movie Spotlight: Does God Know?

The person who planted the 1996 Manchester bomb was never caught. John McCormack was a firefighter in the city when it happened, off duty that day but close enough to visit the site afterward. That fact stayed with him. When he became a filmmaker, it became a question: what if one of the people responsible had spent the next three decades hiding behind a collar?

McCormack wrote, directed, and stars in Does God Know? as Father Sean, an Irish priest with a violent past who refuses an IRA commander’s demand for another assassination, then goes on the run when the same man threatens his daughter. The film’s title is a question Sean holds like a life raft. “He hopes there is a God,” McCormack says, “but he is not convinced. He uses the phrase as a last resort to keep him grounded and focused.”

The collar as cover

McCormack came to the character through a 2017 short film where he played an Irish priest visited by his IRA past. That role stayed with him. Writing Sean, he decided the priesthood wasn’t a sincere calling. It was camouflage. “He was not cut out to be a Priest and it was just his way of getting through life,” McCormack says. As an actor, he used the crucifix around Sean’s neck to carry that contradiction: the icon of something Sean stopped believing in, if he ever really believed it at all.

The Fugitive, Manchester edition

McCormack has been drawn to man-on-the-run stories since childhood, watching David Janssen in the original The Fugitive. Does God Know? became his version. Sean travels across 12 countries over eight months of story, not out of wanderlust but because standing still would eventually cost him everything. The turning point happens on the Greek islands of Lefkada and Kefalonia, locations McCormack chose deliberately. That’s where Sean finally, quietly, decides to go back to England and confront Brendan.

A bad guy worth following

McCormack leans into the moral discomfort. Sean helped cause a real bombing. His regret is visible throughout the film, in his estrangement from his daughter and in his work alongside learning disabled adults. But regret is not absolution. “One cannot simply forgive someone just because they are sorry,” McCormack says. He invokes Breaking Bad when thinking about what draws audiences to compromised protagonists: characters who do terrible things, whom we follow anyway. He doesn’t answer why. The film doesn’t either.

One man, all the jobs

Working as writer, director, and lead actor gave McCormack unusual latitude. He describes deliberately putting Sean into corners, “a cul-de-sac of where do we go from here?”, and letting the answers come from the character. He built voice-over into the film to give direct access to Sean’s reasoning, a tool that closes the gap between what Sean says and what he is actually thinking. Shooting on the Greek islands, McCormack found the frame around Sean’s most important decision: to stop running from the past and remove it.

What to know before you press play

McCormack’s pitch is direct: “If you like Movies about someone having to go on the run and then risk being caught because they have to take revenge, watch it in one sitting, 85 minutes.” Does God Know? is a film about a man who convinced himself the past was finished with him. He was wrong. The 85 minutes are what happens when he admits it.

Thriller

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Streaming now on Relay.