‘Calm with Horses’ and the impotence of violence
★★★★☆—Also called ‘The Shadow of Violence,’ Irish crime drama stars Cosmo Jarvis, Niamh Algar and Barry Keoghan
Hot daylight filtering in through closed, yellow curtains that belie the muted weather outside. The sedate cries of a woman locked away somewhere in the bathroom. A single, sinister bass note. In an armchair, Fannigan — an agéd man dressed in a white vest, stubbing the last of many cigarettes against a glass table; he barely flinches as a large twenty-something named Arm enters the room. “I don’t want to keep mammy in there too long, now,” Fannigan says. “Fair enough,” says Arm. Dispassionately, he picks Fannigan up and throws him through the table.
Arm is the muscle for a small-town Irish mob clan called the Devers. Following his friend, Dymphna Dever, with an ardent loyalty becoming of a gundog, his reward for his work appears to be (more so than money) the right to belong — to be called one of the family. “The Devers don’t care about blood,” he tells us in the film’s prologue. “It was loyalty. Loyalty was what made you part of the family.” And soon, we see why this appeals to Arm: he appears to have no parents, no siblings, no blood relatives of any kind — except for his son, Jack, a non-verbal, hypersensitive autistic five-year-old, with whom Arm hopelessly fails to relate. Here, the familiar tropes of the crime genre begin to fall into place — the reticent, emotionally-stunted male lackey; the innocents at hazard; the obdurate criminals with unreasonable demands — but don’t go making the mistake of thinking Calm with Horses is just another mob revenge flick with nothing to add to the conversation.
“Everyone deserves better.”
I won’t say the film is ceaselessly profound from start to finish—it is, perhaps, too heavily laden with truculent, pain-obsessed mobster caricatures and their narratively apoplectic female relatives to stand truly intact as a deconstruction of revenge tropes—but it certainly does have its moments. The real narrative drive is not so much the violent events themselves but in studying their sheer impotence. Cosmo Jarvis embodies this impotence wonderfully as the emotionally-stunted Arm, with Barry Keoghan as Dymphna and Niamh Algar as Ursula putting in great supporting performances, a step ahead of the unfortunate melodrama of other cast members. As they fight one another silently over Arm’s fate, he becomes both the pawn and the prize in their war — the war of Arm’s (potential) virtue against Arm’s (demonstrable, dominant) vices. What makes the film tick isn’t the outward rage of a human being against the world, but the inward struggle against the self — even when he interacts with the Devers, it is he who is his own enemy as much they ever can be.
It is the scenes between Douglas (to use Arm’s real name — the one people use when they aren’t expecting him to beat someone half to death on their behalf) and his son, Jack, which best bring this theme to the light. Jack, suffering extreme hypersensitivity, struggles to deal with staple aspects of modern life — even TV is enough to overstimulate and upset him. In one scene, Douglas/Arm tries to convince Jack to try the shooting range at a fair. Jack, uninterested, refuses to hold the BB rifle, but Douglas insists. He is unable to comprehend Jack’s uninterest: “Try it, it’s fun,” he insists, even though all the evidence in the world points away from the idea that his son would, even if he could speak, ever agree with him. Jack screams; Douglas insists harder; Jack screams louder.
“I’ve been a kid throwing a moody.”
Yet, the film serves to tell more than a story of a violent father and innocent son caught up into his world of crime. The screaming Jack is little more than Arm’s mirror image: the more he screams, the more he looks like Arm in his hopeless struggle against nothing as he carries out the Devers’ dirty work; Arm, unable or unwilling to free himself from their vice-grip; Arm, into whose incapable, ungrasping hands the Devers press their violent needs and whims upon him, like that BB rifle into the hands of his own crying son. The archetypal violent man is as ill-equipped and ill-placed within the modern world — along with all its nuances, its complexities and its dialogues — as Jack is. The mirror image runs deeper when viewed alongside Arm’s haunting opening monologue: “I’m told I was a violent child — usually to myself … I have this memory of someone holding me. Just holding me, just fuckin’ willing me to stop screaming. I don’t know why I’m screaming.”
But in a way atypical of many modern tales of shock violence, the personas of Douglas and Arm aren’t all that distinct from one another. Douglas really is a terrible father, which is only exacerbated by his son’s greater-than-usual needs — he is not without moments of tranquillity, but his primary interactions with Jack are characterised by his rage, his intolerance, his insensitivity. He gives precious little reason to root for him — the dramatic tension of the film comes less from a wish to see Douglas to escape the Devers, and more from the hope that Jack and his mother, Ursula, might escape him. These two desires work in tension against one another: the naïve desire to see Arm come to his senses and leave the Devers, and that which, more sensibly, knows Jack and Ursula deserve better regardless.
“The people in your life. Your family. Is this really what they want from you?”
Here is where the script really comes into its element: almost all of the scenes are pervaded either by a nauseating sense of foreshadowing, or of a similitude between characters and situations that tries to tell us something about violence — the something which the reticent Arm is unable to say himself. Whether it’s through the background voices of a TV game show that act as stand-ins for Arm and his victims as he beats them bloody, or through the eponymous horses that seem to exist as therapeutic sock-puppets for Jack and Arm alike, or through the pub fool discussing getaways to Mexico while Arm grapples with his estrangement from his son, the film determinedly speaks to us even when its emotionally inept characters obstruct any chances for discussion. While other crime films tend to fall into one of two categories — those which present violence and criminality prima facie, and those which steer clear of violence itself as a means of narrative subversion, Calm with Horses carefully balances the shock horror of the former with the meditative speculation of the latter.
At least on the indie scene, the anti-revenge subgenre is alive and well. Fresh takes on revenge come to the table multiple times a year — for every Tarantino film or John Wick instalment, there comes also a Blue Ruin, Pig or You Were Never Really Here to combat the former examples and their reluctance to explore their subject in any depth. Yet, even among these latter dramas, Calm with Horses stands tall. I’ve said already the film is a way away from perfect, but with such a tight and nuanced script brought so cleanly to the screen, and with excellent performances from the three main cast members, it comes wholly recommended from me, both for fans and sceptics of the crime genre.
