‘I’m what you meet if you ever find yourself on the wrong side…’
British gangster flicks, whilst entertaining, often tend to be pretty derivative. If you’ve seen one pale man have his head slammed in a car door whilst being called a slag, you’ve seen them all. Calm with Horses is not British, but it is Irish, and so yes, there are pale men punching and being punched. There is a gangsters moll (kind of). There is blood, violence and numerous lines of cocaine. The thing that sets Calm with Horses apart is there is also a beating heart at the centre of it all…
Arm (Cosmo Jarvis) is a man of few words. As the hired muscle for a notorious crime syndicate, he is a man who leads with his fists. When a gang member is accused of behaving inappropriately with a 14-year-old girl, Arm is called in to deal with this issue by up-and-coming gang member Dympna (Barry Keoghan). Arm’s professional life stands in stark contrast to his attempts to bond with his son and his estranged ex Ursula (Niamh Algar). It’s all very exciting.
Calm with Horses is a brilliant film for the first hour. Jarvis is menacing, but also strangely vulnerable, Algar displays more of what made her so effective when appearing in Shane Meadows’ The Virtues, and Keoghan probably delivers the best performance in the whole movie as the cocky, assured rising star. Ultimately, the attempt by director Nick Rowland to combine a violent gangster movie with a family drama unravels in the third act, as Calm with Horses struggles to decide what it wants to be. Until then however, Rowland delivers a film drenched in menace and shot through with heartbreak. A film that smacks you in the mouth one minute and then shatters your heart the next.
This dichotomy, combined with a sterling effort from the ensemble cast, ensures that Calm with Horses always punches above its weight, eventually becoming greater than the sum of its parts. Well worth a look.