Effi o Blaenau      Director: Marc EvansCert: NoneGenre: DramaStarring: Leisa Gwenllian, Tom Rhys Harries, Nel Rhys Lewis, Owen Alun, Carys Gwilym, Gavin Lee Lewis Running Time: 1 hr 31 minsNever mind the Christopher Nolan film. This week’s most compelling reworking of Greek mythology is Marc Evans’s robust Welsh-language Effi o Blaenau. Adapted by Marc Evans, director of Resurrection Man, and the playwright Gary Owen from Iphigenia in Splott, Owen’s well-regarded one-woman show, the film relocates the action from Cardiff to Blaenau Ffestiniog, where Euripides’ tale of sacrifice becomes a contemporary tragedy about poverty, inequality and criminally underfunded healthcare.It blazes across the screen with energy and urgency, sparked by a mesmerising performance from Leisa Gwenllian.Effi is trapped in a cycle of unemployment, binge drinking and crushing hangovers, barking at her nan or unfortunate neighbour and drifting through life with her friend Leanne and lovestruck Kev. She neither expects nor imagines prospects or a change of lane until she meets a former soldier, Lee, at a nightclub. She’s immediately smitten and, following a nervy wait for calls or texts, pregnant.What follows is a detective story that doubles as barbed commentary on decades of austerity. Here, merciless fates are replaced by the effects of callous governance.Evans does a remarkable job of fashioning Owen’s monologue into a movie. The Welsh language proves as musical as the slate landscapes of Blaenau Ffestiniog are imposing. Eira Wyn Jones’s restless camerawork keeps the audience in lock-step with Effi’s jagged edges.Gwenllian is magnetic, mapping Effi’s journey from vodka-swilling bravado to heartbreak with gusto. Defiant, abrasive and pained, she’s the beating heart of a film that stares into the lens and says, “what are you looking at?”, but in Cymraeg. In cinemas from Friday, July 17th