The Fall of Sir Douglas Weatherford      Director: Seán Dunn Cert: 15AStarring: Peter Mullan, Jakob Oftebro, Lewis MacDougall, Oliver Maltman, Sid Sagar, Kerry Fox, Jimmy Yuill, Jonathan Hyde, Gayle Rankin Running Time: 1 hr 36 minsIt’s impossible not to think about Game of Thrones tour buses trundling through Co Down and Co Antrim when you watch Sean Dunn’s debut feature.Set in the fictional Scottish village of Arberloch, it follows Kenneth (Peter Mullan), a widowed local historian devoted to preserving the legacy of Sir Douglas Weatherford, an obscure 18th-century inventor and philosopher he claims as an ancestor.The punchline? For all Kenneth’s aristocratic aspirations, Sir Douglas was a monstrous exploiter and sometime surgical experimenter on the lower orders. An oblivious Kenneth spends his days leading tours in period costume at the village visitor centre, presenting Weatherford as a neglected hero of the Scottish Enlightenment to baffled or bored tourists.His life’s purpose is upended when a hugely successful fantasy (and dreadful-looking) television series, The White Stag of Emberfell, arrives to film nearby. As TV devotees descend on the village and tourism pivots towards franchise attraction, local history is swiftly eclipsed by commercial fantasy. Historical exhibits are swiftly replaced by Planet Hollywood-style props.Dunn cleverly asks if anything in the visitor’s centre from the before times was real. Equally, The Fall of Sir Douglas Weatherford uses the culture clash of a besieged but abetting village to probe how communities construct and market their identities and exploit the gullibility of lunk-headed fanship.The satire is sharpest when excavating the awful peer of the title and the commodification of culture, but the film gradually becomes something more melancholic. Mullan, always tremendous, finds both humour and pathos in Kenneth’s dilemma, framing him not as a crank but as a wounded, increasingly manic figure trying to hold on to a version of the past that is best forgotten. Even when the screenplay wavers tonally between broad satire, absurdism and bittersweet character study, the veteran actor provides a much-needed focus.The result is an ambitious, occasionally uneven debut whose many ideas dilute its dramatic clout.Streaming on Mubi from Friday, June 12th