Calvary

John Michael McDonagh's Calvary opened in 2014, two years after The Guard, which had the same lead, and won the Irish Film and Television Awards for Best Film and Best Director. It placed McDonagh 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 the defining performances of his career.

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 in the confessional. An unseen parishioner tells him that he was abused as a child by another priest, since dead, and that he intends to kill Father James in seven days, an innocent priest standing in for a guilty one, as revenge against the Church itself. Over 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 work out which of them is going to do it.

It is a black-comic parable, and also an Irish reckoning with the Church after a decade of revelations about child abuse, one that asks whether the priesthood can still offer anyone pastoral integrity. The jokes are black and frequent, and they never cancel the grief underneath. Gleeson's performance, weary and luminous, is one of the most serious portraits of a religious vocation in recent cinema.