Accepting work as labourers for businessman Gerald (Owen Roe) on a soggy building site in rural Ireland, they share digs in a dilapidated corrugated iron hut reminiscent of Charlie Chaplin’s in The Gold Rush. Their task is to prepare the way for Gerald’s brain wave; a theme park celebrating the famine with stick-thin local girls playing the victims and a bright pink ship-themed restaurant to serve the visitors. Unpaid, unhappy and embroiled in a national scandal, the duo find their friendship tested to the limit. Wide Open Spaces struggles to find the pathos in the travails of these two lost, defeated souls. The screenplay never helps establish an emotional attachment to the characters and is sparing when it comes to revealing any kind of back story.