Film Archive

Calvary

Variety Critics’ Choice: Europe Now! 2014 / Calvary / Ireland, United Kingdom 2014

Reuniting The Guard star Brendan Gleeson with writer-director John Michael McDonagh, this masterful follow-up features Gleeson as a tough-minded Irish priest marked for death by one of his parishioners. The film offers a mordantly funny survey of small-town iniquity that morphs, almost imperceptibly, into a deeply felt lament for a fallen world.

Synopsis

Writer-director John Michael McDonagh and actor Brendan Gleeson made a big splash with 2011’s The Guard, which offered little indication of the depths of humor, compassion, despair and grace they would achieve in their next collaboration. From the shadows of a confessional, an unseen man tells his local priest (Gleeson) how he was sexually abused as a child, a crime for which he will exact retribution in the most irrational way imaginable. "There’s no point in killing a bad priest,” he says. "I’m going to kill you because you’re innocent.” What follows is an existential detective story of sorts, or perhaps an Agatha Christie whodunit by way of Hitchcock’s I Confess, in which the priest goes about his coastal village, tending to his flock while a seven-day clock ticks quietly away in the background. What he finds is a community steeped in anger, disappointment and a near-total indifference to contemporary questions of faith.

Justin Chang

About the film

100 min / Color, DCP

Director John Michael McDonagh / Screenplay John Michael McDonagh / Dir. of Photography Larry Smith / Music Patrick Cassidy / Editor Chris Gill / Producer Chris Clark, Flora Fernandez Marengo, James Flynn / Production Reprisal films / Coproduction Lipsync Productions / Cast Brendan Gleeson, Chris O’Dowd, Kelly Reilly, Aidan Gillen, Dylan Moran / Contact Fox Searchlight Pictures UK, CinemArt, a.s. / Distributor CinemArt, a.s.

About the director

John Michael McDonagh (b. 1967, London) is a British-born writer and director of Irish descent. His first important cinematic endeavor was the screenplay for Ned Kelly (2003), director Gregor Jordan’s adaptation of the Robert Drew novel Our Sunshine. McDonagh’s directorial debut, the comedy thriller The Guard (2011), was a critical and box-office success and the most successful independent Irish film of all time. McDonagh calls it the first part of a planned "Glorified Suicide Trilogy,” whose second part is the recent Calvary. Both films were successfully premiered at the Sundance festival.

Contacts

Fox Searchlight Pictures UK
Twentieth Century House, 31/32 Soho Square, W1D 3AP, London
United Kingdom
Phone: +44 207 314 7005
Fax: +44 207 753 0112

CinemArt, a.s.
Národní 60/28, 111 21, Praha 1
Czech Republic
Phone: +420 224 949 110
E-mail: [email protected]