“Calvary”: A good priest takes on a poisoned church and a crazy Irish village — salon.com

One could argue that the title of John Michael McDonagh’s film “Calvary” is a massive spoiler, all by itself. That depends, of course, on people grasping the reference, and also making sense of the way the Irish writer-director deploys it in this tragicomic parable about an honorable small-town priest facing both a fallen world and the demise of his own institution. If you saw McDonagh’s earlier collaboration with the tremendous Irish actor Brendan Gleeson, “The Guard,” you’ll have some sense of the setting and context: a remote and undeniably picturesque village in the west of Ireland, suggestive of fairy tale or old-fashioned wind-blown rural romance, but injected with the startling force of modernity. But while the tone of “Calvary” is initially similar, mixing mordant black comedy with notes of genuine human anguish, the destination is a different and much darker one.

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