Film classification: how filthy, filthy sex warnings are being replaced with mental health concerns

When I last spoke to Dr Ciarán Kissane, Ireland’s director of film classification, he revealed that he had spent time looking through the annual reports that the censor (as the job was titled until 2003) had dispatched to the minister for justice. “It gives voice to the office,” he said. “At different times the office-holder was critical of the treatment they were getting in the press, but they felt they weren’t able to respond because they were part of the Department of Justice.”

For all the travails the nation still endures, it is hard to deny that our unhappy addiction to pinch-mouthed censorship is largely a thing of the past. The most recent Irish Film Classification Office (IFCO) report, published this week, is a model of inclusion and positive thinking. Far from barking commands at cinemagoing serfs – an unfair caricature for decades, to be fair – the office now speaks of its research into “behaviour and attitudes”. The public has been asked about “the suitability of existing classification guidelines”.

We used to worry about filthy, filthy so-called consensual sex. Now, thanks to contributions from younger people, the IFCO is, quite properly, proposing guidance on “content that can be seen to impact on mental health”. The resulting drafts have gone out for public consultation. You didn’t get that when archbishops were burning prints of Brief Encounter on O’Connell Street. (Obviously that didn’t actually happen, but David Lean’s 1945 romance really was banned.)

The new document, reporting 2023, is punctuated with graphics showing decisions on recent films: a 12A for the gentle Past Lives, a PG for the lively Matilda, an 18 for the out-there Poor Things. It doesn’t feel like an accident (though it may be) that one of the titles listed was Ira Sachs’s Passages. In my interview with Kissane I noted that the searing drama, featuring moderately explicit gay sex, received a 16 cert from his office and an 18 from the British Board of Film Classification.

It has been a while since such divergences, which would have once seemed a monstrous aberration, generated any great surprise. The oblique reference is, nonetheless, welcome. Not only are films almost never refused a certificate, essentially banning the title, but, in 2023, a mere seven per cent were saddled with an 18. (That may have something to do with mainstream studios being more conservative in their approach to challenging material.)

While the report is largely concerned with the IFCO’s key interest in offering guidance on content, along the way it also provides wider observations on the state of the medium. We learn that the number of films offered for certification is almost back to pre-pandemic levels. The total box office is up 10 per cent on 2022, but, as an accompanying chart indicates, a huge portion of that is down to Greta Gerwig’s celebrated Barbie. That film alone took close to 10 per cent of the overall total of €101 million generated at the Irish box office.

Cinemagoers will correctly guess that the majority of films classified were from the US, but those wedded to anglophone titles may be surprised to learn that Indian films were just 1 per cent behind. Movies from those two countries make up more than half the titles granted a certificate in 2023.

All of which is tasty stuff for the dedicated nerd. The most interesting part of the report for the casual observer is the summary of complaints received. One might reasonably assume the postbag bulges with tirades from viewers who collapsed in the aisle during a torrid outbreak of heavy petting. This is not the case.

“I would look at the number of complaints we get,” Kissane told me last year. “People are not generally coming back to us and saying, ‘You’re way out of kilter with where society is at’.”

There were, indeed, a mere 26 complaints in 2023 and two of those were objecting to a certificate being “too strict”. Hats off to the brace of punters who desired a wider audience for Elizabeth Banks’s disreputably entertaining Cocaine Bear. “The filmmakers have made the interesting decision to lean into enough blood and viscera to generate a (now fairly rare) 18 certificate,” I wrote in my review. Should those under the age of majority be allowed to see bears hopped up on coke chewing off heads in Wicklow? This is one our friends in the UK’s classification office were more lenient about, but questions were never likely to be asked in the Dáil.

On a less frivolous note, it is worth observing that the most complained-about issue of the year did not concern sex, violence, bad language or blasphemy. Seven people (a lot in this context) objected to the “depiction of attempted suicide” in the Tom Hanks drama A Man Called Otto. The picture received a 12A from the IFCO with a warning about “suicidal ideation” and a second note that it “depicts scenes of attempted suicide”. Opinions will diverge on the rights and wrongs of the decision. It is surely good, however, that these debates have moved on from prudishness to genuine concerns about mental health.

It is hardly worth fretting over the one viewer who worried about the cert for Brandon Cronenberg’s Infinity Pool being “too lenient”, but it does sound like a lone invitation to turn back the clock. There is no doubt Infinity Pool is an extreme picture. I am always on the lookout for those rare releases that get four “strong” ratings in the IFCO’s matrix of warnings about violence, drugs, sex/nudity and language. Young Mr Cronenberg hits the quad. The film did, however, score an 18 certificate and the only less “lenient” rating is a ban. We don’t do that any more.

Still, at least that complainant was whinging to the correct person. What to make of the several people who wrote to the IFCO noting that The Banshees of Inisherin disappointed as regards “historical accuracy”, “societal values”, “accents” and “portrayals of Irish people”?

Maybe we really should give 18 certs out for bad Irish accents. That’s just the sort of charmingly stupid behaviour paddywhackery that atrocities such as Wild Mountain Thyme expect of the Irish.

Sign up for push alerts and have the best news, analysis and comment delivered directly to your phone