Calvary: Atoning for sins of the fathers, by Jenny Mccartney, Telegraph (UK) (April 13, 2014)

Dir: John Michael McDonagh. Starring: Brendan Gleeson, Chris O’Dowd, Kelly Reilly, Dylan Moran, Aidan Gillen

Few actors have such a distinctively grounding presence as Brendan Gleeson, an auburn-haired native of Dublin with an impressively broad and stocky frame. He can anchor films that might otherwise have disappeared on the wings of their own conceits. Most memorably, perhaps, In Bruges (2008), Martin McDonagh’s film in which Gleeson played an older, quieter hitman struggling to wrestle his junior partner, a frantic fast-talking Colin Farrell, back to earth.

In Calvary – this time by the writer-director John Michael McDonagh, Martin’s brother – Gleeson plays a priest, Father James Lavelle, a thoughtful but morally muscular man who is well respected in his parish.

He is visited in confession one Sunday morning by a parishioner who informs him, in blunt and searing terms, that he was abused by a paedophile priest from the age of seven, from which he has suffered continuous torments, and that he now intends to wreak revenge by killing “a good priest”, Father Lavelle. The prospective assassin even makes a date for it.

Gleeson’s character thinks he knows who the parishioner is; the audience does not, and the film introduces a cast of bitter and troubled characters – each of whom, one feels, could suddenly reveal murderous intent. The arrangement is heavily theatrical, and yet the satire on the darkest extremes in modern Ireland retains a sharp and immediate bite.

Its treatment of child abuse and cover-ups within the Catholic church; the heady shedding of values in the stampede for money and property; the hectic advertisement of an explosive sexuality, which in decades gone by was kept too tightly repressed.

Like most satirists, McDonagh appears to have a pungent contempt for the bulk of humanity, slivered with feelings of empathy. At one level, Calvary is a black comedy, stuffed with bitter drollery and discontented oddballs, from Dylan Moran’s grotesquely bumptious banker, spiritually awash in a sea of cash, to the viciously bleak, coke-snorting doctor (Aidan Gillen). Chris O’Dowd, too, is wonderfully unsettling as a butcher veneered with joviality.

It begins almost in the territory of Father Ted noir, and yet the more one looks at Calvary, the more difficult questions and truths it seems to contain.

Throughout, it is acutely aware of the legacy of pain caused by abusive Irish priests, not only to their victims but also to the innocent clergy who must now walk in a poisonous fog of suspicion. In one scene, Lavelle is making happy small talk with a young girl he has met strolling along a country road, when her furious father turns up in a car and shoves her in, glowering as though he has caught the priest out in something indecent.

Lavelle, whose hard-won calm contains a passionate core, turns out to have private troubles of his own: he entered the priesthood after the death of his wife, without realising that his daughter (Kelly Reilly) felt abandoned by him, too. She arrives to see him after having attempted suicide: there is a tender awkwardness in their relationship which strikes a different note from the rest of the film.

As tragedy inexorably tightens around Lavelle, Gleeson steers the story home. The actor’s burly form seems increasingly leaden and tortured as we become aware of the growing weight of what he must bear: the failures of the locals, the church, even his own. The biblical echo of the title grows stronger.

Stripped down – for all its theatrical shocks and glittering cruelties – Calvary is a film that believes in the persistent, redeeming power of faith and forgiveness.