Film Review: 'The grating roar'

Following The Guard, their 2011 collaboration, Irish director John Michael McDonagh and actor Brendan Gleeson team up once again for Calvary, a much bleaker but still blackly comic small-town story.

Calvary is about faith in the face of the increasingly jaded relationship between the modern world and the Catholic church.

A good measure of Samuel Beckett with a pinch of JP Donleavy and a drizzle of Brendan Behan go into McDonagh's creation.

There is a terrific central performance from Gleeson, who carefully steers the story towards its somewhat operatic but fittingly melancholic close.

Father James (Gleeson) is the well-liked priest of a small town on the west coast of Ireland. In a confessional, a parishioner tells James of the sexual abuse he suffered at the hands of another priest. He further tells James that because the offending priest is dead, he will kill James instead because the murder of a good priest would be worse for the Catholic Church than the murder of a bad one.

James is given a week to put his house in order before his "crucifixion". While James is pretty sure he knows who is responsible for the threat, the film keeps us guessing as we are introduced to an increasingly disturbed bunch of sheep in James's flock.

There's the mechanic from the Ivory Coast (Isaach de Bankole), who is the lover of the wife of the butcher (Chris O'Dowd), the local mansion-dwelling wastrel (Dylan Moran) and the cynical atheist doctor (Aidan Gillen). There's also James's suicidal daughter (Kelly Reilly), who has come for a visit after her latest failed wrist slash.

The mystery of who might be responsible for the threats is a red herring. The main point of the story is to introduce us to the quirks of the flock over the course of a week, and James's increasing self-doubt.

While the largely comic The Guard featured a more avuncular Gleeson, Calvary is enveloped in a cloak of melancholia. This mirrors its central theme of the crisis of faith facing the church as an institution battered by the repercussion of the scandals it has faced over the last few decades.

McDonagh allows his actors plenty of space to revel in their oddities while keeping the film firmly directed towards its bleak conclusion, nimbly steering it through all its layers of emotion along the way. But it is to the towering and assured performance of Gleeson that the ultimate credit must go for keeping this an intriguing, funny yet touching and intelligent examination of lives and ideals in flux. As St Augustine wrote, in a quote that opens the film, famously used by Beckett in Waiting for Godot: "Do not despair, one of the thieves was saved. Do not presume, one of the thieves was damned." The problem is, as Father James realises, there is no way of knowing which thief you are until it is no longer up to you.

• 'Calvary' opens at cinemas nationwide today

What others say

Calvary touches greatness. It crawls clear through the slime and comes out looking holy.

Xan Brooks, The Guardian

It plunges us, without ado, into the guts of a moral crisis, but it also has a satisfying smack of the whodunit or, rather, a who-will-do-it.

Anthony Lane, The New Yorker