By Brian Viner
Published: 09:15, 11 April 2014 | Updated: 09:15, 11 April 2014
Verdict: Killingly funny
Rating: 
From its arresting opening line, Calvary promises much of what it goes on to deliver: scalpel-sharp dialogue, and a truly wonderful lead performance by Brendan Gleeson as Father James, a decent, hard-working Catholic priest in an Irish village that is less Ballykissangel than Ballykissdevil.
Gleeson is in almost every scene, and with a lesser actor at its core, this wouldn't be half the picture it is. The irony is that the most memorable lines aren't his, beginning with that lacerating opener, delivered by one of his parishioners in the anonymity of the confessional box.
This man explains that he was sexually abused by a particular priest from the time he was seven years old, but that his abuser is now dead, so Father James must carry the can. He is told that he will die on Sunday week, once he has had a chance to get his house in order.
Killingly funny: Brendan Gleeson is magnificent in dark Irish comedy Calvary
It is an intriguing premise, and one that could unleash a pure, straightforward thriller, but the writer-director is John Michael McDonagh, who gave Gleeson another peach of a role in the darkly humorous 2011 film The Guard, and whose brother Martin also cast Gleeson, unforgettably, as a world-weary hitman in the marvellous In Bruges. So naturally what ensues here is more of the black stuff: comedy, McDonagh-style.
With the heavyweight Gleeson anchoring the film, the other characters get to bob around him, few of them as believable as the shaggy priest with a rocky hinterland.
Father James was married before he entered the Church. He has a troubled grown-up daughter (Kelly Reilly) and a history of alcohol dependency. But that just gives him more empathy for his parishioners, a thoroughly motley collection, including Veronica (Orla O'Rourke), the promiscuous wife of the butcher who sports facial bruises that may have been inflicted by the butcher himself, Jack (Chris O'Dowd).
She's not an easy woman to live with, Jack tells Father James, before delivering another of the film's most cherishable lines. 'I think she's bipolar, or lactose intolerant, one of the two.'
Veronica's assailant might also be one of her occasional lovers, an immigrant mechanic (Isaach de Bankole), who is not above threatening a man of God.
Add to these an obnoxious, unhappy financier (a dead-eyed Dylan Moran) who has bought the local big house, the policeman (Gary Lydon) with a penchant for rent boys, a coke-snorting doctor (Aidan Gillen) and a reclusive American writer (M. Emmet Walsh) eager to get his hands on a gun, and we have a cast of suspects for a crime yet uncommitted.
Moreover, just to increase the intrigue, Father James tells the Bishop that he knows who has issued the death threat. What he doesn't know is how seriously it should be taken, and of course nor do we.
McDonagh could have cranked up the intrigue even more, but gives us instead a series of character studies.
These include studies of the character of the Catholic Church — with which, for all his own commitment and integrity, Father James's parishioners have a deeply complicated relationship — and indeed of rural, parochial Ireland.
McDonagh feeds us the standard clichés born of a thousand movies, not least the cheery ceilidh in the village bar, but carefully subverts them. The bar, it transpires, is about to be sequestered by the bank. And all this is symbolised in sporadic shots of the Sligo landscape, as bleak as it is beautiful.
So this is a thought-provoking film, as well as funny and moving. But it is not without misjudgments.
The obtuse younger priest (David Wilmot) might have been lifted from an old Father Ted script, and the rent boy speaks with an affected Brooklyn patter that is plain irritating. McDonagh sometimes strains too hard to find his gallery of grotesques.
All that is forgivable, however, which is apt since forgiveness is at the heart of the picture itself.
After all, and above all, it gives us Gleeson in glorious form, a big-hearted, bear-like man in a cassock the size of a Demis Roussos kaftan who like all the best screen clerics, from Karl Malden in On The Waterfront to Tom Hollander in Rev, rather makes you wish he was the real thing.
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