*** SPOILERS WARNING ***
This is now on amazon prime, so there will probably be a lot more viewers. If you like end of the world stories without aliens & explosions, you'll like this, but it is a bit slow moving with an ambivalent ending.
just to answer a few points raised by petern362 in his review:
1) "However the point about the fisherman is well taken as most Irish lakes are stuffed with fish and could feed an army for ever."
That really bugged me, they should have been out there every day fishing, and they had the equipment to do so. It was a pretty big lake in a pastoral setting.
2) "Why did a tanker full of fuel decide to get stuck outside their house and then mysteriously lose all its contents overnight?"
The police stopped the tanker on the road, scared off the driver, and were unable to empty the truck. The unarmed raiders who attacked the cabin stole the fuel, as the next day the police asked why the cabin-dwellers did not stop them.
3) "When the raiders came, where did the firecrackers suddenly come from?"
The police gave them signal rockets in an earlier scene, to call for help if needed.
4) "Why was there only one sheep in a place like that? (Surely there would be hundreds)"
May have been the only one who escaped their field. I'd think farmers would keep a close eye on them in a situation like this, and not let them wander around in the hundreds.
5) "And finally, why did the power return for a few hours and then vanish again. To get power, there had to be a power station somewhere that had been started up. (That's no mean task if it had previously been switched off)"
Maybe, just guessing, someone who did not know what they were doing started it up the wrong way, and it burned out. It some jury-rigged repair did not hold.
6) "The premise of the film was good but it was not sufficiently thought out. People lived for 1000s of years without electricity, so there is no reason why they and the villagers could not have done the same."
Modern people are soft, and have no idea how to live off the land (as shown here). Plus, there are a lot more people now to feed. The neighbor Tim was into sustainable living, which is why he had a garden, and would have been OK absent murderous neighbors.
As mentioned, they should have been fishing from day one, setting traps for animals, planting potatoes, hiding their freaking food supply (!!!) from raiders, etc., but I think they just assumed everything would soon go back to normal so they did not really do any planning. Plus, people are morons in situations like this.
Sad how the one girl had to basically become a prostitute at the end. I'd have liked some indication as to what happened to them (I thought this was going towards them OD'ing on sleeping pills). I'd think if you are Irish this film would resonate with the history of the potato famine, and they did tie potatoes into the story.
It was not clear if the affair started at the cabin or before.