Nick Rowland makes us care about violent men without asking us to forget what they do. His patient work with actors is worth following, though Calm with Horses finds him less sure about when to turn the music down.
Fi1m perspective
In Calm with Horses (2020), Cosmo Jarvis’s Arm is useful to a gang and struggling to be a father. Rowland lets us watch a man who has little freedom to decide which obligation comes first. We found ourselves hoping he could stop being useful to the wrong people; Jarvis’s tenderness makes that hope hard to dismiss. This is a good, flawed crime drama, and Rowland gives Jarvis room to make a difficult character worth following.
His earlier short Group B (2015) drew on his rally-driving background, bringing action and character together before his feature debut. With Calm with Horses, adapted from a Colin Barrett story, the physical danger sits alongside an ordinary parental problem: how to be present for a child. Joseph Murtagh’s script makes Arm’s divided loyalties clear, giving Rowland something solid to work with before Jarvis supplies the finer feelings. We can see why Rowland keeps returning to troubled men and parent–child bonds; the competing demands give his actors something to play.
The reservations matter because they concern how much he trusts those actors. Calm with Horses is strongest when we can simply watch Arm struggle, but the score too often insists on the difficulty. The music tells us how hard this is when Jarvis has already made it clear. Nor does the familiar crime plotting acquire much freshness from the care taken over the central performance. We would recommend the film for that performance, with the warning that Rowland sometimes pushes for a response he has already earned.
She Rides Shotgun (2025), his second theatrical feature, takes him into an American action thriller with Taron Egerton and Ana Sophia Heger, built around a father and daughter. That relationship keeps the film close to the family concerns of his debut. There is good reason for him to keep exploring those relationships, provided the fathers and children get as much attention as the violence. Start with Calm with Horses, and watch how much Jarvis can do before the music intervenes.
Biography
Nick Rowland is a British film and television director. He is a graduate of the National Film and Television School.
His feature debut, Calm with Horses (2020), premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival in 2019. He has also directed episodes of the series Cuffs (2015), Ripper Street (2012) and Hard Sun (2018), and an episode of The Gentlemen (2024).
