Calm With Horses review: Cosmo Jarvis and Barry Keoghan star in this Irish crime drama packed with soul amidst its murky, gritty surface.
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Calm With Horses review
Cosmo Jarvis portrays Arm, a former boxer who, with limited options available to him, has become a brutal enforcer for the drug-dealing Devers family. He is also trying to be a present father for his young autistic son, a balancing act that becomes increasingly hard to perform as his role with the Devers because more and more dangerous.
Calm With Horses strives to be a modern-day Irish version of On the Waterfront, following a once talented fighter as they struggle to make a life for themselves once they have fallen out of the profession that was the only thing that they knew how to do well. It is a tale filled with a lot of darkness, and that darkness often explodes to the fore in quite a violent fashion. It means that a lot of Calm With Horses can be quite a gruelling experience, as it heads down a bloody road of redemption.
Much of the crime drama beats, while certainly delivered in fashion that gets under your skin thanks to the tactility of the setting and the violence, is still operating largely in crime drama cliche. It may be downbeat and a drama that takes itself very seriously, but it is all largely predictable if you’ve seen similarly styled kitchen sink dramas before.
Related: Calm With Horses trailer
What sets Calm With Horses apart from the pack are the performances that drive it. While a lot of the major beats of the plot do feel quite run of the mill, you will find that you can’t help but be wrapped up in the drama that is unfolding. Much of that is down to Jarvis’s lead performance as Arm. He is a revelation as the lead, Brando-esque in body and mind. A man more prone to grunts than he is words, this is an intimidating man, large in stature and packing the wallop of a caged bull. But beneath that all he is also a father trying to do his best with the situation he finds himself in, a situation in which he feels he doesn’t have the capability to change. He may frighten you one minute, but there’s a lot of heart, and Jarvis wears it on Arm’s sleeve, delivering many moments that are devastatingly emotional, particularly as it builds to the finale.
Barry Keoghan continues a steady streak of very accomplished performances as Arm’s handler in the Devers family. Manipulating Arm’s family life to his own means, whilst also hiding behind Arm’s hulking frame when things get too ugly, Keoghan is great as a young man trying to act like a big one, and struggling to convince as someone in control. Niamh Algar as Arm’s ex-girlfriend and mother of his kid is also fantastic, a dedicated mother desperate to escape the destruction pull of her hometown and the whirlpool of danger that Arm’s employment with the Devers creates for her and her son. She is also someone who does genuinely care for Arm, and the chemistry between them is part of why you feel yourself falling for these characters, and what makes the film tick, turning it into a tense bottle rocket of danger and emotion.
Calm With Horses may not be all that original when it comes to the story that it is telling, there’s a lot of elements you’ll recognise and it doesn’t take too many guesses to assume where it’s all going. But it has a way of getting under your skin, through a combination of a downbeat, brutal tone and a cast of performances which all care deeply about their characters. A live-wire drama sparking with soul thanks to an exceptionally great cast.
Calm With Horses is released in cinemas on 13th March.
