There is a hard-hitting documentary to be made about the wellness industry and whether a minority of practitioners might not be selling scented snake oil to desperate people. But TG4’s Sonas (“Happiness”) is not that documentary. This is feel-good factual filmmaking, where hard questions are left to one side, and everyone has a grand time.
Still, it is what it is and benefits from the presence of Áine Ní Bhreisleáin, a likeable host on an engaging, emotional journey. As with many people, Ní Bhreisleáin has experienced burnout and, having downsized her career, is now focusing more on herself rather than pleasing others. Ní Bhreisleáin explains that she was “under massive pressure and stress from work”.
“I left a full-time broadcasting job I was in since I was 20. I want to switch up my life,” she says. That means putting “health and wellness to the forefront” and “hoping to find some sort of balance”.
Ní Bhreisleáin starts at a wellness festival in Dublin, which looks like Electric Picnic for people who never leave the house without their yoga mat. Joe Wicks and Vogue Williams lead huge open-air aerobics sessions which, to be fair, has to be better for your mental health than watching Noah Kahan from the back of a field.
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Áine Ní Bhreisleáin brings us on a wellness journey featuring Joe Wicks, yurt saunas and flinging beer bottles with vengeful abandon
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Then it’s off to a gym, where champion handball and personal trainer Ciana Ní Churraoin imparts perhaps the most valuable lesson of the entire episode: what we do is not who we are.
Ní Churraoin learned this through personal experience after tearing her cruciate ligament in 2017. “Before that, I had a deep connection with this image of myself as an athlete. ‘What’ll I do now? All I do is play sport’. It gave me a chance to explore who I was outside sport. A lot of people ... we’re deeply connected to what we do instead of who we are.”
Ní Bhreisleáin then travels to Tigh’ n Alluis, a “yurt sauna” in rural Dublin, run by two brothers who dress like Peaky Blinders cosplayers. She pops into a caravan sauna and then a barrel full of ice water, bringing on goosebumps and spiritual clarity. Finally, the presenter and a pal visit Ireland’s only “rage room” in an industrial estate in Kylemore, Dublin, where they smash the bejaysus out of a TV ad and chuck bottles against a wall.
“I feel freer and looser than I did when I went in,” says her friend. It would have been helpful at this point for an expert to chime in and unpack the psychological benefits of flinging beer bottles with vengeful abandon. But Sonas has no interest in investigating the depths of the Irish psyche. Rather than a hard-core ice bath of a documentary, it’s the equivalent of a scented diffuser from a discount store – fine for what it is, but definitely on the disposable side.
