Calvary

John Michael McDonagh's Calvary opened in 2014, two years after his earlier The Guard with the same lead, and won the Irish Film and Television Awards for Best Film and Best Director. The film consolidated McDonagh's reputation alongside his brother Martin McDonagh (In Bruges, Three Billboards) as the most distinctive Irish-British screenwriter-directors of their generation. Brendan Gleeson, in the lead, gives one of his career-defining performances.

Father James Lavelle (Gleeson) is a parish priest on the Sligo coast — widowed before ordination, a recovering alcoholic, broadly respected by his congregation. The film opens with him in confession, listening to an unseen parishioner announce that he, the parishioner, was abused as a child by another priest who has since died, and that he intends to kill Father James in seven days as a substitutionary act of revenge against the Church itself. Across the week that follows, Father James visits each member of his small congregation — Chris O'Dowd's butcher, Kelly Reilly's troubled daughter, Aidan Gillen's atheist doctor, Dylan Moran's wealthy Anglo-Irish industrialist — and tries to discern who is going to do it.

The film operates simultaneously as black-comic parable, Irish state-of-the-Church reckoning with the sustained child-abuse revelations of the previous decade, and meditation on whether the contemporary priesthood can still offer pastoral integrity. Gleeson's performance, weary and finally luminous, is one of the most quietly serious portraits of a religious vocation in recent cinema.