A good movie

To be honest, I wasn’t really sure what to expect from this flick but since it had been very well received, I was quite eager to check it out. Well, Martin McDonagh had a rather spotless track-record but it was easily his most gorgeous movie so far. Indeed, the action was taking place on some remote island on the coast of Ireland and McDonagh definitely made the most of this beautiful location. On top of that, the whole cast gave some really top-notch performances (Colin Farrell, Brendan Gleeson, Kerry Condon, Barry Keoghan). I was especially impressed by Keoghan who is slowly becoming one of the most interesting character actors at work nowadays. My appreciation also had to do with the fact that I understood the point of view of both men. Indeed, I was actually much younger than Colm, around 16 years old, when I became seriously bored by the people around me and, like him, I had a strong desire to take my distance. Eventually, I even immigrated to a different country and nowadays I have barely any friends at all so, even though many people might find his change of attitude towards his best friend completely ridiculous, I completely understood it. On the other hand, Pádraic’s reaction to the sudden change of behavior of his best friend was also quite understandable and I get why he tried to get back this relationship because, according to him, there was nothing wrong with it in the first place. Another thing about this movie that really worked was how they perfectly managed to match some seemingly contradicting tones. Indeed, you had a lot of sweet quirky humor but also some dark period drama and it was really neat how McDonagh managed to make it all work together. Unfortunately, even though it all seemed to work out, in my opinion, the final act seriously derailed the whole thing. Indeed, towards the end, it became terribly bleak and, to be honest, well, they actually lost me there. To sum it up, Colm cut 5 of his fingers, Jenny the Donkey died by accident, Pádraic burned down Colm’s house and Dominic seemingly killed himself and, well, obviously, it was all serious dark. Anyway, to conclude, even if the ending did feel like a cold shower, it was still a solid movie and it is definitely worth a look.