Martin McDonagh makes foul-mouthed, sometimes violent people funny without forgetting the harm they do. We admire the warmth beneath his black comedy, though his plotting can become too convenient for the characters’ good.
Fi1m perspective
In In Bruges (2008), two hitmen look around a medieval city and get on each other’s nerves. Martin McDonagh gives them ugly insults to trade, then allows the men delivering them to seem frightened, foolish and capable of affection. We recommend it warmly, with a reservation about the increasingly contrived plot. The appeal of his writing is clear in these exchanges: guilt does not require anyone to stop being funny. Nor does being funny make their work harmless.
His darkly comic rural Irish plays of the mid-1990s preceded the short Six Shooter (2004), which brought grief, absurdity and violence together on screen. In Bruges was his feature debut. The American-set Seven Psychopaths (2012) and Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri (2017) took his writing into different surroundings, with the latter examining revenge, grief and small-town justice. The Banshees of Inisherin (2022) returned to an Irish island and to Colin Farrell and Brendan Gleeson, with friendship and mortality among its concerns.
The return to that pairing makes sense. Farrell and Gleeson are central to making In Bruges work: their bickering gives the dialogue its pleasure, while their affection stops the unpleasantness becoming exhausting. We were moved by their companionship because they make these men’s concern for each other believable without asking us to excuse what they do. McDonagh does not tidy them up to earn our sympathy. The actors sustain our interest when the writing starts to strain, giving the exchanges enough warmth to make another argument welcome.
The trouble in In Bruges comes when McDonagh has to organise the action. Events become too conveniently arranged, and we start noticing the effort required to get people into position. Those conversations set a standard that the crime plotting struggles to meet. That matters in a film which has persuaded us to take these foolish men’s feelings seriously, and it is a substantial reservation about otherwise persuasive writing. Start with In Bruges for Farrell and Gleeson, and forgive a few overworked turns in return for their company.
Biography
Martin McDonagh is a British-Irish playwright and filmmaker. He was born on 26 March 1970 in Camberwell, London.
McDonagh wrote and directed the feature films In Bruges (2008), Seven Psychopaths (2012), Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri (2017), The Banshees of Inisherin (2022) and Wild Horse Nine (2026). He also wrote and directed the short film Six Shooter (2004).
His plays include The Beauty Queen of Leenane (1996), The Cripple of Inishmaan (1996), The Lonesome West (1997), The Lieutenant of Inishmore (2001), The Pillowman (2003), A Behanding in Spokane (2010) and Hangmen (2015).
