Calvary (Review)

NOW FOR THE REVIEW…

You know you’re in for an emotional hour and forty-one minutes when the first line of dialogue is, and we quote, “I first tasted semen when I was seven years old.” As Brendan Gleeson’s protagonist priest puts it, it’s “certainly a startling opening line.” And Calvary just keeps going from there.

Writer-director John Michael McDonagh has chosen, for his sophomore follow-up to 2011’s black comedy The Guard, a much darker tale of death and forgiveness that is as haunting as it is richly enthralling. Imagine Father Ted minus the obvious cartoonish humour and you have as close a visual as you can without seeing it. It’s annoying that Empire Magazine has already used the “Father Dead” pun for their review of this film, but that’s irrelevant.

McDonagh once again excels as a writer, with each line of dialogue oozing with perfection and every character provided with the right amount of gravitas to stay with you long after exiting the auditorium. His direction, however, seems to have matured greatly since his first film; less reliance on instantly-quotable humour, more focus on the compelling humanity that drives each frame. In one particular scene set in the church section of a hospital, Gleeson’s Father James confronts a woman who has lost her husband in an accident. The dialogue between them is extremely profound as are the performances, but it is the lighting and cinematography that give it the strange gothic visuals that catapult it into cinematic beauty. It almost looks like a shot from Robert Wise’s The Haunting, the way the moonlight shines through the glass windowpanes and onto their faces. It’s a shining example – no pun intended – of the extravagant mise en scène that McDonagh has given to his film.

Though the film sets itself up with the promise of murder in a one-shot opening scene where the face of the would-be killer is unseen, Calvary barely gives attention to the overall mystery that lingers throughout the rest of the film. Father James even claims not long after that he already knows who the killer might be, and even when their identity is finally revealed to the audience it is nowhere even close to a big reveal. It all feels incidental, but intentionally so – the film’s real focus is on Father James connecting with the locals in his small Irish village as well as his visiting daughter (Kelly Reilly) before he must confront his fate. The problem is, most of these locals are either hostile or internally deranged – Aiden Turner’s self-described “atheist doctor” has a disturbing monologue involving a young boy and anaesthesia gone horribly wrong, and the wife of Chris O’Dowd’s butcher (Orla O’Rourke) proudly boasts her various acts of adultery in front of everyone she comes across. Any one of them could be a murderer by the end of the film, whether Father James knows who it is or not, and that’s one of the cleverest aspects of the film; it’s playing out a murder-mystery without us even knowing it. Thankfully, we’re invested enough to give a damn (again, no pun intended) about what may or may not happen to those involved.

All of the performances here are A-grade, with Gleeson of course forming the centre of everything with his quietly tortured but nevertheless brilliant on-screen performance. A far cry from his unhinged policeman character in The Guard, Gleeson here portrays Father James as a man haunted by his past but even more so by his present, with the harsh personalities of his community as well as less-than-favourable public views of the Catholic Church regarding certain allegations (hit home perhaps the most brutally when a friendly conversation with a young girl is halted by her angry and suspecting father) providing little salvation for someone who must provide it for everyone else. As such, he finds himself more and more accepting of his eventual fate and he, like Calvary itself, has nothing to lose yet comes out of everything fresher than ever before.

SO, TO SUM UP…

Calvary is an extraordinary spiritual follow-up to The Guard with exceptional writing and direction by John Michael McDonagh, a wonderful cast led by Brendan Gleeson’s astounding performance, and beautiful visual storytelling that should rank easily among one of the year’s best and strongest. Yes, even four months into the year…