THE IRISHMEN

Toxic masculinity. Violent acts. Gangster servitude… Ireland-set Calm With Horses may be a small, independent film crafted by homegrown talent but it’s a movie with all the swagger, verve and impact of a classic crime-thriller. Total Film gets the craic on a must-see debut…

- JANE CROWTHER

Total Film first met director Nick Rowland during the 2015 BAFTAs, when he told us (as we queued to get into the venue) he was developing an adaptation of a short story about ferocious thugs in rural Ireland. We wished him luck and thought nothing more about it until TIFF 2019, after electric audience reactions to a raw, brutal/beautiful tale of a former boxer struggling to negotiate the push-pull of criminality and family responsibility in a rural dead-end town. Like the festival’s other breakout hit, Uncut Gems, Calm With Horses is an urgent, kinetic, ultimately melancholy study in tension with cacophonous sound design, dark humor and an ostensibly unlikeable protagonist making poor life choices. And it heralds the arrival of major new talent, both in front of and behind the camera – the sort of film you want to get in on early to feel smug further down the line. “I hope,” says Rowland when we catch up with him, post-fest, in London, “in several years to come, people will look at this film and say, ‘Oh my God, these three young actors came together on this film and now they’re doing this, that and the other...’”

Small town boy