IN BRUGES: Irish Film Week

IN BRUGES sends two Irish hitmen to Belgium after a job in London goes badly wrong. Ray, played by Colin Farrell, wants absolutely nothing to do with Bruges. Ken, played by Brendan Gleeson, is delighted by the medieval streets, churches and canals and would quite happily spend the trip sightseeing. They’ve been ordered to lie low and wait for instructions from their boss Harry, played by Ralph Fiennes, but it quickly becomes clear that the trip isn’t simply a holiday between assignments.

Martin McDonagh’s first feature moves effortlessly between crime film, black comedy and something much sadder. Ray is reckless, immature and often extremely funny, but he’s also carrying a level of guilt he doesn’t know how to live with. Ken gradually understands that the job waiting for them may force him to choose between loyalty to Harry and compassion for the man standing beside him. Fiennes arrives later and turns Harry into one of the film’s great comic creations: terrifying, principled in his own absurd way, and furious whenever the world fails to obey his personal code.

I’ve programmed IN BRUGES immediately after THE BANSHEES OF INISHERIN because the pairing lets us watch Colin Farrell, Brendan Gleeson and Martin McDonagh fourteen years apart. The actors are playing completely different men, but both films revolve around damaged male friendship, stubbornness, guilt and two people becoming trapped inside rules they’ve partly created for themselves. BANSHEES takes those ideas into rural Ireland and slows them down until they become almost mythic. IN BRUGES throws them into a crime story and lets everyone swear a lot more.

This is also one of the strongest crowd films in the entire week. IN BRUGES arrived as McDonagh’s feature directing debut after an acclaimed career in theatre and immediately established the tone that would define much of his later cinema: morally compromised characters, elaborate insults, sudden violence, genuine tenderness and jokes appearing in places they really shouldn’t. Farrell won the Golden Globe for Best Actor in a Musical or Comedy, while McDonagh received an Academy Award nomination for Best Original Screenplay and won the BAFTA for Original Screenplay. The film has only grown in stature since release and is now firmly established as one of the defining cult crime comedies of the 2000s.