I've been eagerly waiting for this as I listened to the West Cork podcast. I found that to be very biased, the podcasters clearly formed a bond with Ian and Jules and they took the approach that he was just a harmless poet living this bohemian lifestyle and why didn't the nasty Garda just leave him alone.
They glossed over the domestic violence and overall treatment of Jules and the whole podcast seemed to be about poor old Ian. Sophie was barely mentioned.
Already I'm encouraged by the film's more sympathetic view of Sophie and her family.
But Sophie's family were satisfied with the West Cork podcast, according to the producers in the 'extra' at the end and they've certainly never said anything to the contrary while they withdrew their cooperation from Murder at the Cottage and have been vocally critical of its use of photographs of Sophie's body, and the scenes where Jim Sheridan and Nick Foster talk to Ian Bailey from the Paris courtroom, which her uncle told the media 'turned the trial into a kind of farce'.
(I believe that all those archive interview clips with Sophie's parents those are old are replacing up-to-date interviews with her family, but the family withdrew permission for them late in the day, so the producers replaced them with old footage.)
I actually think the podcast stands up well to Murder at the Cottage.
I think the two podcast makers were very aware that their longterm access to IB might make it look as if they were biased, but I think that part of the 'story' as they see it is examining how a man who's been suspected of a murder for 25 years lives his life, and how his partner does.
I didn't think they softpedalled the violence to Jules at all, but in a podcast, all you can do is talk to people and describe things, and Jules really wouldn't play ball and just kept saying Ian shouldn't drink spirits, whereas the strength of a TV documentary is that you can show images, and those images of Jules' battered face and the sheer amount of hair he'd pulled out had a much bigger impact.
I'm also pleased she eventually left him. (Though she is funding the purchase of a caravan so he has somewhere to live, as he is penniless and homeless, and his only income is from selling pizza in the market. He was trying to crowdfund a collection of his own (truly terrible) poetry recently, but I don't know if he reached his target.)
I was actually just listening to the final episode of WC today, and I was struck how they edited it so that the last speech IB makes in the whole 14 episodes is his utterly narcissistic tirade in the taxi on his way to be arrrested. They're very late and his lawyer phones to ask where he is and then phones back to tell him that there's not going to be a public arrest on the steps of the courthouse, but business will be conducted discreetly indoors, and IB (who apparently wanted a showy handcuffing and was carrying a book of his own poetry) loses it and starts shouting about how they need to wait for him, and then starts telling Jennifer Ford, the podcast maker, who, as her husband points out in the voiceover, was 6 months pregnant, that she'll have to get out of the car and out of his way fast so he can make his 'entrance'.
I found that actually quite chilling, especially given how well he knew them both at this point -- this heavily pregnant woman who'd spent years sitting around his kitchen table talking, was just an obstacle to get out of his way. I thought it was a brilliantly ambivalent moment to end on.
In a small community like that I can imagine that Sophie's arrival was quite the talking point. Attractive, wealthy French woman moving in - completely alone. Wouldn't surprise if some local drunk fancied his chances one night and tried to break in to get to her and it escalated into murder.
Not really. One thing that neither the podcast (by two Londoners) and Murder At the Cottage (by a Dubliner) really got right is that Schull is really not just the remote little backwater of 'blow-ins' and' locals' they both represent it as. It has also attracted the seriously moneyed, especially yachting types, and there are lots of multi-million euro second homes, Jeremy Irons and Sinéad Cusack live nearby, so do David Puttnam and Graham Norton, Saoirse Ronan just bought a house not far from there etc etc, and it's quite common to randomly run into famous people in the pubs around in the summer. A foreigner who bought a modest house, came a few times and year and kept herself to herself would barely register for most people.
What I think has been under-explored is the context of the local drug scene lots of people growing weed, and a lot of small deserted cove for import of harder stuff and fairly longstanding rumours that the murderer may have been a locally notorious senior cop, now dead.