★★★★1/2 Until now, the films of director and playwright Martin McDonagh have always proved interesting. That is to say, not only as a total object of the cinema, but sequence by sequence. The viewer cannot know if what follows a moment will be comic or dramatic, although in general -Hiding in Bruges and Three Announcements for a Crime prove it- the script manages to take us to a distance where we can smile even in tragedy. That implies, by the way, having actors who understand those tones on the edge of the genres. Here he narrates how two friends stop being friends because of the decision of one of them. It also narrates life in a remote town on an Irish island, on the border between civilization and barbarism, in reality an archaic world of daily brutalities that has been left out of the world (the final comment on the civil war in Ireland is revealing about). But these two fellows, stolid Colm and down-to-earth Pádraic (Colin Farrell extraordinaire, by the way) are two characters from the old silent comedy, or Commedia dell’arte. Two polynchinels dragged by decisions as irrevocable as the landscape frozen in time. At this point, this story takes us to deep places by force of smiles and normalized violence. Nothing to do with the movies we see every week, but movies at last.
