Calm With Horses review – crime and brutal punishment in rural Ireland - MW

Musician and actor Cosmo Jarvis is looking forward to being a young Marlon Brando in this brutal Gothic reality series set in the West of Ireland, directed by Nick Rowland. Adapted by screenwriter Joe Murtagh from a short story by Colin Barrett in his award-winning Young Skins collection, it is a short crime film with a series of tragedy, despair and dark humor. unconnected. He acts strong and docile, and horses are brought - because animals are often in social films in real life - as a symbol of the nobility of salvation. But I think that in terms of storytelling, it turned into macho violence.

Jarvis plays Douglas, a tall and fierce former boxer who is now a law enforcement officer for a drug-trafficking company. They are the Devers family: Paudi (Ned Dennehy) and the older brother Hector (David Wilmot). A young cousin of Devers is Dympna (Barry Keoghan), who brought Douglas into this job and it is his semi-official job to take care of Douglas, manage him and make sure he goes out. appear in all the terrible missions of the brothers. Right now, Douglas has to beat an old man who raped his teenage granddaughter Hector, Charlotte (Hazel Doupe), and he demands this punishment with considerable professionalism in a completely inaccessible scene. But his boss was satisfied with the level of pain.

Meanwhile, Douglas is experiencing a kind of self-awakening. He has a five-year-old son, Jack (Kiljan Moroney), by former partner Ursula (Niamh Algar); the boy has autism, and Ursula has to pester Douglas for the money to send their son to a special school. As his boy gets older, it dimly dawns on Douglas that he, too, has a condition himself: an inability to control his surges of rage and anxiety. Ursula knows that Jack is helped by sessions of horse-riding and suspects the same might be true for Douglas – which results in a tender and engaging scene. Douglas in his muddled way is trying to be a good dad, though is unsure how this could be achieved.

But really, the language of this movie is fear and violence, peppered with some black-comic dialogue riffs between Dympna and Douglas. Perhaps the ending of the film is a little predicable, but a talented and well-directed cast keep this movie motoring along, and Jarvis is a fierce screen presence.

MW