Like Titane, Calm with Horses is one of those movies I had to sit with for a long time before I really knew what to say about it.
Directed by Nick Rowland, Calm with Horses follows Arm (Cosmo Jarvis, who really should have had his career launched by his amazing turn in Lady Macbeth a few years earlier), an ex-boxer who works for the criminal Devers family (featuring Barry Keoghan as his closest friend in the family) as an enforcer as he tries to navigate a difficult relationship with his son and his ex (Niamh Algar, also of the excellent Censor).
Calm with Horses is a gritty, grey, and even gruesome film, to be quite honest. It’s not an easy watch, from the unsettling sexual abuse subplot within the Devers family, to the shocking violence Arm commits against those he’s aimed at. And there’s a lot to recommend to it – the performances are uniformly excellent, the writing is rich and invites a deeper dive to really catch all those small details, and Rowland finds a way to shoot this very average Irish town in a way that makes it almost a little eerie, despite it’s banality.
For me, though, what made Calm with Horses such an extraordinary film was the way it balanced brutality with tenderness. It’s right there from the first scene, where Arm carries out an attack on a member of the Devers family; he’s greeted like an old friend, politely gives the victim time to sequester his mother somewhere safe, and then savagely assaults him. It’s all the more shocking for how gentle Arm seems until he’s not – for how normal this all feels, until it turns into a brutal attack. The way Jarvis plays this character constantly toes the line between those two aspects of himself – that part of him that craves acceptance, tenderness, kindness, and intimacy, and the part of him that believes, profoundly, that the only way he can earn that from people is through violence.
Arguably the movie’s climactic moment comes when he blames himself for the death of a previous boxing opponent – and it’s the first time in the film that he’s met with the reminder that, while his opponent might have been young, he was basically a child, too. It’s these moments of almost raw vulnerability and emotional openness that cut through the rest of the challenging movie, a script and a performance that beautifully balances the two opposing forces. It’s right there in the title – the calm with horses referenced in the film’s name is the softness and peace Arm and his son finds around horses, an upfront reminder of the humanity at this film’s heart.
It would have been easier to make a film that was purely focused on the brutality of the world that Arm inhabits, but it’s the lightness and tenderness that lifts it into something spectacular. Even when it’s sad and difficult to watch – which is often – Rowland doesn’t give in to total, relentless nastiness, and it’s all the better for it.
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By Lou MacGregor
(header image via The Guardian)
No But Listen 