101 min | R | July 31, 2020 | Saban Films
Douglas “Arm” Armstrong is an ex-boxer turned enforcer for a rural Irish crime family. He is loyal to the wrong people and gentle with the wrong people, and the two cannot coexist forever. The film asks what a violent man owes the people he loves, and answers in blood.
Douglas “Arm” Armstrong is a former boxer who now breaks bones for the Devers family in rural Ireland. He follows orders from Dympna Devers and rarely questions them. Off the clock he tries to be a father to his autistic son and a partner to the boy’s mother, Ursula. The film is about a body trained to inflict damage and a mind that cannot reconcile that work with the tenderness it also wants. Nick Rowland builds the whole thing on that contradiction. Arm is a weapon owned by people smaller and crueler than he is.
Cosmo Jarvis plays Arm as a wall of muscle with a frightened animal living inside it. He hunches his shoulders and lowers his eyes and speaks like the words cost him. The performance locates the boy underneath the enforcer. Barry Keoghan plays Dympna with a jittery, grasping menace, a low-level dealer who mistakes proximity to power for power itself. Niamh Algar plays Ursula with a clear-eyed exhaustion that refuses to soften Arm or excuse him. Ned Dennehy turns Paudi Devers into a coiled patriarch whose quiet is worse than any shouting.
Rowland directs his first feature from Joe Murtagh’s script with a control that resists the genre’s pull toward spectacle. The camera stays close on Jarvis’s face and holds there until the silence becomes pressure. The film shoots the County Kerry landscape as bleak and beautiful at once, wide grey skies pressing down on small ugly violence. The sound design lets long stretches go quiet so that each act of brutality lands without scoring or warning. Rowland edits the fight scenes for impact rather than choreography, cutting close and fast so the violence feels like accident more than action.
This is a film about a man who has been told his whole life that his only value is his capacity to hurt people. Arm wants out and does not have the language or the leverage to find the door. The crime plot is competent and familiar, and the film knows that the plot is not the point. The point is the gap between what Arm does and what he wants to be. Rowland and Jarvis keep their attention on that gap and refuse to let the gangster machinery close it for them.