Hugh Mulhern: Organised chaos

For most young directors, winning two heavyweight industry accolades (Best New Director at the UKMVA and Best Music Video Director at the Young Arrows) would be the ultimate validation of their work. 

But for Riff Raff’s rising star Hugh Mulhern, the biggest compliment came from the eight-year-old son of one of the Young Arrows judges, who caught sight of Doolally - Mulhern’s latest video for East End G-folk artist, Hak Baker - on his mum’s screen and demanded: ‘Wow – what’s that?’

A frenzied, feverish depiction of party culture fuelled by the sleep deprivation and disassociated state that accompanies a 36-hour bender, Doolally doesn’t exactly scream kid-friendly viewing. But as Mulhern cheerfully admits, at the tender age of eight, he himself was watching Kill Bill and other age-inappropriate DVDs sneaked out of his older brother’s room - thanks to his cinephile dad who ‘never censored anything’. 

Music videos are a playground.

Body horror aside, there is a genuine sense of kids’ play and giddy experimentation in Mulhern’s work, from floating balloon-heads filled with laughing gas, car rides realised as retro video games, or a phone thief transforming into a lip-licking panther as he spots his mark. “Music videos are a playground, it’s a childlike medium after all,” he says. ““I feel like I need to get it all out of my system, so that when I go to make drama or features, they’re not full of little naked grass-covered men.” 

It took several years of “slogging away at music videos” – and a course of therapy - for Mulhern to embrace his inner child. “In the past, I was trying to appeal to the tastes of other people - whether that was the manager, the band, or the industry. It was a bit disingenuous,” he explains. “Something that clicked for me was trying to make work that I could enjoy, but also for the eight-year-old me. Stuff that you immediately want to watch again.”   

A huge part of the re-watchability factor is Mulhern’s madcap approach to mixed media, seen to great effect in Telephones 4 Eyes and Doolally, his two promos for Hak Baker. Prosthetics, live-action, found footage, stop-motion, and generative AI aren’t just gently folded together – they’re chucked in a blender and whizzed on full power, producing a special effects-laden smoothie that’s moreish, yet mildly stomach-churning. Speaking of stomachs, there’s an incredible cameo from a prosthetic one in Telephones 4 Eyes: a thief nicks a mobile phone, gets possessed by it and ends up with a gaping hole in his belly, through which Baker roars a politically-charged protest against modern technology.

Something that clicked for me was trying to make work that I could enjoy, but also for the eight-year-old me. Stuff that you immediately want to watch again.

Prosthetics have always fascinated Mulhern, but he actually started his career in film as a lighting technician while studying for a degree in film and TV production at Dublin’s IADT. “Although I was never allowed to turn anything on,” he laughs. “It was mainly carrying sandbags around.” His penchant for organised chaos also drew him into the nightlife scene, hosting illegal raves in abandoned churches around the city. How much did he draw on those days when directing Doolally, a chronicle of the messiest night out imaginable? “I have a fairly cynical view of party culture,” says Mulhern. “I explored that world for a couple of years – and in my experience, there’s nothing particularly worth exploring. Yes, there are moments of joy on a dance floor and there is a sense of community that you get from dancing, but I also think there's a lot of pain being suppressed in those environments. It’s escapism.”

Around this time, he started making “really terrible DIY music videos for my friends, Irish hip hop artists and hardcore punk bands. I wasn't making anything with any thought, though, it was all quite aimless”. After being blacklisted as a spark, he turned his hand to editing, and then signed up for a Masters in directing fiction at the NFTS. All the while, he was creating music videos for the likes of Sega Bodega, Inhaler, For Those I Love and Kojaque.

A “big pivot” in Mulhern’s career – and one he credits with getting signed to Riff Raff’s Nursery of Evil - was working with Irish post-punk band Fontaines D.C. “When they blew up, people in the UK started taking me more seriously,” he says.  He won a Young Director Award for A Hero’s Death, starring Game of Thrones’ Aiden Gillen as a cheesy talkshow host who’s losing the plot (in true Mulhern fashion, it’s laden with grotesque prosthetics, puppets and myriad blink-and-you’ll-miss-them moments). But it was the one-two punch of Telephones and Doolally that catapulted Mulhern into the spotlight as a filmmaker with a fearsomely fresh take.

While the videos are thematically very different – Telephones is a politically-charged polemic against modern technology and mindless scrolling, versus the pure party anthem that is Doolally – they showcase a similarly dizzying array of techniques, particularly the use of generative AI to create a mutating cast of characters. Mulhern worked with AI animator, Dom (@infinite.vibes) on both promos, and remembers their first experiments using the platforms Midjourney and Stable Diffusion: “My jaw was on the floor, it was so exciting, I couldn’t wait to see how far we could push it. But we soon realised less is more; you have to pepper it in. Because the more time it’s on screen, the more [the viewer] is starting to understand what it is and then their brain starts to disbelieve it.” 

I'm trying to get past that whole, ‘oh you’re the guy who made that weird fucked up video about partying.’ 

Although AI was a brilliant tool to express the deliriousness of Doolally, Mulhern feels it works better in Telephones “by leaning into the theme of sensory exhaustion we experience through our phones - so it's justified on a visual, as well as a thematic, level.” 

Innately drawn to the grotesque and the monstrous (“I’m very pro-Halloween”), Mulhern’s creative inspirations range from the strange and outdated children’s TV programmes he grew up watching on Ireland’s RTE, to the deepest, murkiest Mariana trenches of the internet (“like most people, I’m always on my phone.”) Interestingly, it was therapy that got him to the mindset that created those Hak Baker masterpieces: “I was figuring out some issues and making peace with myself. Those types of realisations within therapy helped me to arrive at creative realisations.” He’s candid about his reasons for seeking help, as the child of an “incredibly creative and empathetic” father – who was also an alcoholic.

“I didn’t realise until I was much older that my experiences at home weren’t necessarily the norm, but I don’t carry any sort of ‘oh woe is me, I had a hard life, I’m a tortured artist,’” he says matter-of-factly. “Despite my dad’s addiction, I’ve nothing but gratitude for him and how he shaped me.  Yes, I might have been exposed to some of life’s complications a little too early, but it's given me an understanding of the world that I hope is communicated in my work; perhaps a different sort of way of looking at things.”