In Bruges

Martin McDonagh's In Bruges opened in 2008 (McDonagh's debut feature after a celebrated theatre career as the playwright of The Pillowman, The Beauty Queen of Leenane and the Aran Islands trilogy) and won the BAFTA for Best Original Screenplay alongside an Academy Award nomination in the same category. The film consolidated McDonagh as a major filmmaker and Colin Farrell as a comic leading-man capable of much more than the Hollywood studio system had recognised.

Two hitmen, the panicked Ray (Colin Farrell, in his career-redefining performance) and the gravely watchful Ken (Brendan Gleeson), are sent by their London boss Harry (Ralph Fiennes) to lie low in the Belgian medieval city of Bruges after a job has gone catastrophically wrong. The film follows their few days in the city as they wait for further instructions: visiting the Bruges belfry, drinking in the pubs around the Markt, encountering local characters at the Christmas-market film shoot Ray accidentally walks into. Clémence Poésy plays the Belgian production assistant Chloë; Jordan Prentice plays the dwarf actor Jimmy.

The film operates simultaneously as broad-comic gangster picture, theological investigation of guilt and responsibility, and quiet meditation on the city of Bruges as a tourist-experience and as an actual place. Eigil Bryld's photography of the Bruges architecture and Carter Burwell's score anchor the film's continuing emotional register. McDonagh would extend the same broad register through Seven Psychopaths (2012), Three Billboards (2017) and The Banshees of Inisherin (2022).