CALVARY: Irish Film Week

CALVARY has one of the most gripping and hard-hitting opening scenes of any film in recent memory. Father James is hearing confession when the man on the other side of the screen tells him he was sexually abused by a priest as a child. The priest responsible is long dead, so the man has chosen Father James as his target instead. His reasoning is chilling: killing a bad priest would mean nothing, but killing a good one might actually make people take notice. He gives Father James one week before they meet again..

Brendan Gleeson plays Father James, a by no means perfect but largely well-intentioned and pious man. Over the following days he continues visiting the people in his parish, gradually revealing a community full of anger, loneliness, cynicism and resentment. Chris O’Dowd, Aidan Gillen, Dylan Moran, Kelly Reilly and Gleeson’s son Domhnall are among a remarkable ensemble cast. John Michael McDonagh fills the film with the black humour familiar from THE GUARD, but CALVARY is considerably darker. The jokes sit beside questions about faith, responsibility and what happens when an institution’s crimes contaminate even the people within it who are trying to do good.

I’ve included CALVARY because it gives Irish Film Week a very different kind of Brendan Gleeson performance and because it confronts something central to modern Irish history: the collapse of the Catholic Church’s moral authority following revelations of widespread institutional abuse. McDonagh doesn’t turn the film into a simple argument for or against religion. Father James has inherited a crisis he didn’t create, and the film asks what personal goodness can accomplish when the institution a person represents has lost the trust of the people around it. It’s also a useful companion to THE GUARD later in the week. Same director, same leading actor, same west Ireland setting, but a completely different emotional register.

CALVARY premiered at Sundance in 2014 before screening at the Berlin International Film Festival, where it won the Prize of the Ecumenical Jury in the Panorama section. It went on to win Best Film at the Irish Film & Television Awards, alongside Best Actor for Brendan Gleeson and Best Script for John Michael McDonagh. Gleeson also won Best Actor at the British Independent Film Awards, where the film was nominated for Best British Independent Film, Best Director and Best Screenplay. CALVARY remains one of McDonagh’s most accomplished films and one of Gleeson’s defining leading performances.