Calm with Horses | Little White Lies

Calm with Horses

12 Mar 2020 / Released: 13 Mar 2020

Words by David Jenkins

Directed by Nick Rowland

Starring Barry Keoghan, Cosmo Jarvis, and Ned Dennehy

Four young people standing together in a dark, colourful setting, holding drinks.
Four young people standing together in a dark, colourful setting, holding drinks.
3

Anticipation.

Nice cast, decent word from its festival premiere, could be something here…

3

Enjoyment.

An intriguing character study with an underpowered crime story in the background.

3

In Retrospect.

Lots of little worthwhile elements, mainly performances from Cosmo Jarvis and Niamh Algar.

This Irish gang­land saga is pow­ered by excep­tion­al per­for­mances from Niamh Algar, Cos­mo Jarvis and Bar­ry Keoghan.

Right out the gate, it’s worth draw­ing atten­tion to the per­for­mance deliv­ered by Niamh Algar in this at times wist­ful, at oth­ers aggres­sive­ly morose Irish crime dra­ma from fea­ture debu­tant Nick Rowland.

Her char­ac­ter, Ursu­la, sits on the periph­ery of a com­mon set of cir­cum­stances. She is a lone woman trapped in a world of vile, sav­age men for whom anti­quat­ed notions of pride and hon­our result in an end­less spi­ral of graph­ic beat­ings and oper­at­ic slay­ings. She works at a sta­ble where hors­es are rid­den for ther­a­peu­tic pur­pos­es, and the heal­ing pow­er of these noble beasts seems to work on slow-wit­ted lunk Arm (Cos­mo Jarvis) and the learn­ing dis­abled son he has with Ursu­la (the pair are friend­ly but no longer an item).

We watch as Arm tra­vers­es these two worlds: one in which he is a mono­syl­lab­ic goon for the law-flout­ing Den­vers clan, under the wing of Bar­ry Keoghan’s wheedling, drug-push­ing lieu­tenant, Dymp­na; and anoth­er, where Ursu­la can quick­ly induce a sense of seren­i­ty and hope in his piti­less life. Jarvis’ colos­sal frame, as the ex prize­fight­er gone to seed, strikes fear in the hearts of those he’s about to hob­ble with his giant meat hooks, but Algar plays Ursu­la as a woman no longer able to expe­ri­ence fear.

She is a paragon of har­di­ness, yet nev­er once opts for vio­lence – phys­i­cal or rhetor­i­cal – as a mode of expres­sion. So often in films such as this, women play the strick­en damsel, or the extra­ne­ous arm can­dy, and through her tough, empa­thet­ic per­for­mance, Algar brings some­thing unique and ethe­re­al to the table. The lyri­cal qual­i­ties of her scenes with Jarvis, in the end, serve to empha­sise some of the film’s more hack­neyed ele­ments, such as a cen­tral plot mech­a­nism ripped direct­ly from the Coen broth­ers’ Miller’s Crossing.

In fact, all the mate­r­i­al involv­ing the Den­vers and their wicked brood feels half-cocked or inef­fec­tu­al, even when some of screen­writer Joseph Murtagh’s salty dia­logue does man­age to raise a wry tit­ter. The film laments the vor­tex-like nature of crim­i­nal endeav­our, and sug­gests that once you’re in, there’s only one way out – vio­lent death. A moral strug­gle ensues and Arm begins to com­pre­hend that his pay­mas­ters per­haps don’t have his best inter­ests at heart, par­tic­u­lar­ly when they ply him with Class As in order to con­vince him to com­mit ever more heinous acts against their unwit­ting enemies.

It’s the aspects that are usu­al­ly duti­ful scene-set­ting and con­text build­ing that are the most effec­tive here: a lengthy, adult con­ver­sa­tion in a din­er about future plans; or a strange stand-off between Arm and a kind­ly dowa­ger who is being ripped-off by would-be suave Den­vers’ patri­arch, Hec­tor (David Wilmot). Visu­al­ly, Row­land and cin­e­matog­ra­ph­er Piers McGrail couch the seamy pro­ceed­ings in a back­drop of semi-squalor, all tum­ble­down ter­races, unlove­ly scrub­land and some kind of dis­used indus­tri­al plant as the boss’s lair.

It’s the per­for­mances, though, which shine bright­est, notably Jarvis, whose crum­pled, mum­bled turn chan­nels the Methody likes of James Dean and Mar­lon Bran­do, and Algar, who will sure­ly be trou­bling awards podi­ums in the not-too-dis­tant future.

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