THE IRISHMEN
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 humour 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
Originally a, which tracked disenfranchised characters facing economically predetermined fates in a tiny Irish town, first attracted Rowland’s attention as a NFTS student trying to get a handle on short-form writing. After his short film, , was nominated for a BAFTA, he returned to the story, joining with producer Daniel Emmerson to option it and commission Joe Murtagh to adapt the script. An English former rally driver (more of which later), Rowland may not have had the hardscrabble Irish background described in the book but he recognised the protagonist of the story, Douglas ‘Arm’ Armstrong – a blinkered heavy for a fearsome family of drug dealers, who is ordered to kill for the first time and makes a mistake that puts in motion a tragic turn of events. That life of violence is in direct contrast to the tender relationship Arm has with his autistic five-year-old son, Jack, forcing him to decide what kind of man and father he wants to be. (The horses of the title refer to the equine therapy that soothes Jack.)
