Mubi Monday: Calm With Horses (2019)

Let's be completely honest from the start here, Calm With Horses is nothing that we haven't already seen done, and done well, in dozens of other dramas from the UK and Ireland. Thankfully, this has atmosphere and performances that make it very much worth your time.

Cosmo Jarvis plays Arm, an ex-boxer who now works as the muscle for a notorious local family. He's often alongside Dympna (Barry Keoghan), and the family appreciates that he will do whatever is asked of him. Until he becomes hesitant about dealing with Flannigan (Liam Carney), a man accused of a transgression that gives him a death sentence. Stuck between his employers and his own morality, Arm is also struggling to be a good father, and trying to accept that his ex-partner, Ursula (Niamh Algar), is ready to move away from the area to somewhere that could be much better for their young son.

While I have seen Jarvis in a number of different movies over the years, I have not singled him out for praise, although he was been consistently good, and great in Lady Macbeth. This is probably his best performance yet though, strong and ready for violence, but also aware of how much better life can be when people can be softer and peaceful with one another. Everyone else here is very good (Keoghan and Algar just as you'd expect, and Carney, David Wilmot, Ned Dennehy, and Anthony Welsh all perfect in their respective roles, whether they're acting scared, scary, or slightly oblivious to the violent world that is just one side-step away from them), but the film belongs to Jarvis.

This might be the first feature directed by Nick Rowland, but he helps himself enormously by trusting Joe Murtaugh to adapt Colin Barrett's short story, as well as assembling a cast of superb talent. Getting Jarvis in place was probably the most important part, a solid anchor point that everything else can be attached to, but everything is treated with due care and a faith in the material.

It may not be the most cinematic work, and there isn't anything I want to highlight, but everything is in service of the script and the acting in a way that is reassuring. Everyone behind the camera has done their job in a way that doesn't call attention to their valuable contributions, and that is sometimes a lot harder to do than it might seem.

Grim stuff, but not without a fleeting ray of sunshine breaking through the gathering clouds, Calm With Horses is a film I would happily recommend to anyone after something moving and powerful. There are one or two moments that come close to being too uncomfortable to sit through, but Murtaugh and Rowland know just how far to take things, and how to keep the central character riveting as he tries to hold in the anger that is constantly beating him up internally.

9/10

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Mubi Monday: My Brother The Devil (2012)

A superb feature debut from writer-director Sally El Hosaini, this is a film that looks at brotherly love and idolatry, family units, prejudice, and the difficulty of finding yourself becoming a very different person to the one who was living your life 24/7 for so many years.

Fady Elsayed is Mo, a young man who greatly admires his older brother, Rashid (James Krishna Floyd). Rashid is a core member of a gang, which means he also has a mortal enemy (Demon, played by Leemore Marrett Jr.), and that means that he is much more aware of the dangers around him than Mo, who seems so naïve and vulnerable that you can understand why his older brother is trying to keep him away from the gang life. One major incident changes everything for the brothers, and Mo grows more confused as he sees Rashid distance himself from his old life and start off on a new path that those around him may find much harder to accept.

Although it starts in a way that recalls so many other British movies from the past couple of decades, My Brother The Devil soon starts to show viewers that it aims to be a very different look at this particular aspect of British culture (and it is worth noting that the young lead characters are also sometimes trying to incorporate and/or process their Egyptian heritage as they figure out how they want to define their lives). El Hosaini has clearly written about something that she can at least partially identify with, being of British Egyptian parentage herself, and having spent the first few years of her life in Cairo, and she gives her film a clear identity, ironic when you think of the main characters being so unsure of how they want to identify. The writing and direction here give no hint of someone working on their first feature, I can only guess that El Hosaini really honed her craft in her first couple of shorts, which I need to remember to check out at some point.

Both Elsayed and Floyd are fantastic in their roles, natural and believable as brothers. Floyd is clearly the more capable of the two, but he spends a lot of the runtime trying to get his bearings as circumstances around him force him into some surprising and profound self-realisations. Anthony Welsh does great work in his small, but pivotal, role, as does Saïd Taghmaoui, and Elarica Johnson deserves to be singled out for making her character, Vanessa, a standout from the few female characters who get some screentime.

A film about love, while having almost every scene pulsating with an undercurrent of violence and danger, My Brother The Devil is powerful stuff that takes viewers from despair to sweet jubilation. It is El Hosaini’s only feature, to date, and I really hope we get something else from her soon.

8/10

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Journeyman (2017)

Journeyman is the second directorial feature from Paddy Considine, who also wrote the script and stars in the lead role, and it's another incredibly moving and sad film, albeit in different ways from his impressive feature debut, Tyrannosaur.

Considine is Matty Burton, a boxer coming to the end of his career. He has a loving wife (Emma, played by Jodie Whittaker) and a very young daughter. He also has some good friends in his corner (including Tony Pitts and Paul Popplewell) as he faces off against a young, tough boxer who calls himself the future (Anthony Welsh). When his last fight ends, Burton ends up with an injury that affects his brain, and his personality.

The first thing that I noted about Journeyman was the quality cast. Considine has a knack for picking people that can handle the material he gives them, and his own performance is yet another flawless turn in a career full of them. While everyone else does well in their roles, it's Whittaker who easily equals Considine, going through a whole range of emotions in many scenes as she watches the man she loves act like a child, a stranger, or even a potential threat, as his brain refuses to let him find himself.

The second thing I noted is a minor criticism. As the boxing sequence began I felt that it wasn't shot too well. I started to hope that the film wouldn't be focused on the boxing if it wasn't going to be as well shot as any other scenes. I needn't have worried. The boxing is integral to the plot but this is not really a boxing movie. It's a film about a journey, and not just the journey of the main character. The journey also involves his friends and, most importantly, his wife, often struggling without any other support around her.

You could argue that this is a clichéd film, and there are certainly moments that will feel familiar if you have watched any other film about someone trying to overcome major adversity, but that doesn't dilute the power of it. I spent a couple of scenes on edge, there is the threat of violence in a couple of scenes that affected me like a bucket of cold water splashed into my face, but most of the film reduced me to a tear-streaked wreck with a big lump in my throat (a scene with a phone call between Considine and Whittaker will move even the toughest viewer in my opinion).

The film is about love, loyalty (Pitts and Popplewell spend a chunk of the movie avoiding the friend they no longer recognise, or know how to help), pain, and forgiveness (kudos to the writing for not painting the boxer played by Welsh as a panto villain, which allows the actor at least one great moment in the second half).

I was encouraged to watch this recently when it was picked as a film club choice. If that hadn't happened then I don't know how long I would have taken to get to it. Don't make the same mistake as I did. Get on it as soon as you can. Considine has been one of my favourite actors for many years, and he's now also one of my favourite writer/directors.

9/10

Journeyman can, and should, be bought here.