Handsome Devil

John Butler's Handsome Devil opened in 2016 and was widely received as one of the most charming Irish coming-of-age comedies of recent years. The film consolidated Butler, after his earlier The Stag, as a director of warm character comedy with social-consciousness undercurrents. Andrew Scott, in a central supporting role, anchors the film with the kind of gravitas his subsequent Fleabag appearance would amplify.

At an Irish rural boarding school obsessed with rugby success, Ned (Fionn O'Shea), a bullied misfit who would rather sing folk songs than play sports, meets the new term's star fly-half Conor (Nicholas Galitzine), a transferred athlete from another school whose own life situation is more complicated than his rugby reputation suggests. The two boys are forced to share a dormitory room and slowly forge an unlikely friendship — supported, in different ways, by Ned's English literature teacher Mr Sherry (Andrew Scott).

The film operates as broad sentimental comedy with a quieter undercurrent about pressures on adolescent boys to conform — particularly within Irish rugby culture's specific masculine expectations. Cathal Watters's photography of the Co. Wicklow school landscape and the Irish-folk soundtrack anchor a film whose tonal commitment is unusually warm-hearted. The closing minutes are among the more emotionally exact in recent Irish cinema.