Against the odds, Try! takes a familiar sports formula and turns it into a genuinely life-affirming story about coping with "mixed abilities."
In 2025, four Irish teams compete for the Mixed Ability Rugby World Cup in Pamplona, Spain. The sport is the same as full-contact rugby, only without contested scrums. Anyone can compete, no matter how good or bad his or her physical condition is.
Bizarrely for such a violent sport, mixed ability rugby is openly tolerant and accepting. The coaches in particular take special care that no one gets hurt or feels unwanted.
Director Oisín Mistéil follows four teams through training and competition to qualify for Pamplona. In each team, Mistéil focuses on one or two characters.
For Sundays Well Rebels, that character is Richie Philpott, an overgrown "loosehead prop" who's competed for the World Cup before. Richie knows he has a disability, but has made a life for himself with the help of his family and his mother Sheryl. His enthusiasm and optimism are inspiring.
Maeve Owens plays for the Ballincollig Trailblazers from Cork. Maeve has Down's Syndrome; her parents Ted and Ger recall doctors recommending against life-saving heart surgery when she was four months old. "She was never going to be mollycoddled," Ted says.
To raise funds for Pamplona, Maeve and her teammates hold a "dipathon" by swimming in the ocean every day in December. Maeve's best friend Clodagh also has Down's. The extraordinarily sensitive cinematography captures their intimate conversations without exploiting them.
For her hard work and indomitable spirit, Maeve is named captain of her team. Mistéil could have manipulated the moment, but it comes off as sincere and uplifting instead.
Tommy Crawford plays lighthead prop for the Malone Tornadoes. He collects whiskeys and battles depression. He dropped out of rugby for almost 20 years before finding a new set of companions and new reasons to take care of himself with the Tornadoes.
Paul Deacon grew up in a family of athletes, and as an adult assists in his father's stonemason company. He plays flanker with the DLSP Vikings, a team based in Dublin that has never won a competitive game. Practice is a 110-kilometer train ride away.
"I was mildly spasticated," Paul explains to the camera. Mistéil positions Paul in isolated rural landscapes of startling beauty. He composes complicated poetry and can find beauty in a dismal overlook of Dublin smokestacks and warehouses.
Just like any sports documentary, Mistéil includes montages of training and matches. The latter are limited early on to one camera on the sidelines; later, in Pamplona, Mistéil has considerably more resources. To my untrained eye, rugby remains a mystery throughout: kicks, passes, tackles, all with an obscure scoring system.
It's the comments by participants and coaches that elevate Try! "Mixed ability is all abilities," a player on the Tornadoes says, backed up by wonderful glimpses of players on the pitch. "I'm made of tough stuff," Maeve asserts after a brutal tackle.
"A lot of these guys got left out of everything growing up," Gary, a coach, says. "It can be awful to be left out, to go your whole life without being a part with others."
On the other hand, Tommy can never truly defeat depression. "That feeling of being a burden on people, the feeling that you're not worthy enough, you're not good enough," he says.
It's easy to dismiss the "other" as an abstraction. Finding out about people, learning their goal and fears, what makes them happy or sad, makes it almost impossible to remain bigoted against them.
The film enjoyed its world premiere at the 2026 Sheffield DocFest.