10 / 10
Official trailer
In Bruges is Martin McDonagh’s first feature and one of the great films of its decade.
Colin Farrell plays Ray, an Irish hitman who has just botched his first job and accidentally killed a child. Brendan Gleeson plays Ken, the older hitman ordered to take Ray to Bruges and wait there until further orders. Ralph Fiennes plays Harry, their boss, who eventually shows up to deal with the situation. The plot can be described in two sentences. The film can’t.
The script was nominated for the Best Original Screenplay Oscar.
It should have won. The dialogue does in two hours what most dialogue doesn’t do in twenty. McDonagh had been a successful playwright before this film, and you can hear the theatrical pedigree in the rhythm of the lines, but he’d also learned what stage dialogue couldn’t do and used film to do it.
I think this is as close to a perfect film as anything from the 2000s. It’s the funniest movie I know about guilt, and it breaks my heart in the same scenes where it makes me laugh hardest. I don’t have a single complaint worth raising, and I’d hand it to anyone who wants to learn how to write dialogue.
The Setup
Ray hates Bruges. The film opens with him sulking through medieval canals, watching tourists, taking the boat tour, and generally being miserable about being alive. Ken loves Bruges. He sees the architecture, the canals, the bell tower, the museums. The contrast is the whole first act. The script never explains it. The audience learns who these two men are by watching them fail to enjoy the same vacation.
This is patient filmmaking. The major dramatic question of what they’re doing in Bruges and why they can’t leave isn’t answered until well into the second act. The film trusts the audience to stay engaged with two men sitting in a medieval city talking about it. McDonagh lets Ray sulk like a teenager through a city built for postcards, and I find it funnier every minute it goes on. Gleeson’s delight right beside him makes me fond of both men before I learn what they’ve done.
For Writers
Character is revealed faster through contrast than through exposition. In Bruges opens with two characters who react oppositely to the same environment. The audience learns more about Ray from his reaction to a church than from any backstory the film could have provided. Ken’s pleasure in the same church teaches the audience equal amounts about him. The lesson is that putting characters in a neutral situation and watching them react is faster than telling the reader who they are. Contrast accomplishes what exposition would have to grind out.
The Tone
In Bruges is a comedy. It’s also a tragedy and a study of guilt and atonement. McDonagh shifts tones within scenes, sometimes within single lines, and never loses his hold on the audience. The swan boat scene, where Ray and Ken talk about the dead child, is the one I’d point to if someone asked me what tonal control looks like. I laughed at the boat and then couldn’t breathe at the conversation.
The supporting characters are weird in productive ways. The dwarf actor (Jordan Prentice) hired for a Dutch art film. The Belgian drug dealer. The pregnant hotel owner who won’t leave her hotel.
None of them feel like quirky additions. They feel like the kind of people you’d meet in Bruges if you were hiding there.
For Writers
Tonal control is the hardest skill in dialogue-driven writing. Most writers commit to one tone and stay there. McDonagh moves between comedy and tragedy within paragraphs without losing the reader. The trick is that the characters don’t know they’re in a comedy or a tragedy. They’re just people responding to what is happening to them. The lesson is that tonal range comes from character honesty. Real people are funny when they’re devastated and devastated when they’re being funny. Honor that and the tone takes care of itself.
The Code
Harry’s code is the film’s moral spine. He believes children shouldn’t be killed under any circumstances. Ray killed a child. The code requires Ray to be killed. Harry comes to Bruges to do it himself because he won’t ask Ken to do it, and Ken refuses anyway. The third act unfolds according to Harry’s rules, and Harry is willing to follow them all the way, including against himself, when his own actions in the film accidentally fall under the same prohibition.
The film neither endorses the code nor parodies it. It treats Harry as a man whose worldview has internal coherence and who will follow it to the worst conclusion. Ralph Fiennes plays him as a tightly wound English working-class man committed to his manners, and I think it’s the best work of his career. Whenever Harry opens his mouth I’m laughing and frightened in equal measure.
For Writers
An antagonist with a coherent code is harder to defeat and more interesting to follow than an antagonist with mere appetites. Harry in In Bruges has rules. He follows them. He pays for them. The cost of his code is the third act of the film. The lesson is that giving an antagonist a clear moral principle that they won’t violate makes them more dangerous. The reader knows what they’ll do because they’re predictable. The predictability makes the threat real.
Craft Note
Martin McDonagh wrote and directed his feature debut. Colin Farrell as Ray. Brendan Gleeson as Ken. Ralph Fiennes as Harry. Clémence Poésy as Chloé. Jordan Prentice as Jimmy. Carter Burwell composed the score. Filmed on location in Bruges. Released February 2008. Roughly thirty-three million dollar worldwide gross on a fifteen million dollar budget. Nominated for Best Original Screenplay Oscar. McDonagh went on to direct Seven Psychopaths, Three Billboards Outside Ebbing Missouri, and The Banshees of Inisherin.
Is In Bruges as good as people say?
A 10, and In Bruges deserves every point of it. The script is the best original screenplay of its year by some distance, and it should have won the Oscar. Farrell, Gleeson and Fiennes are all doing some of their best work. It’s funny, devastating, profane and humane in proportions that shouldn’t coexist, and I can’t find a flaw in it. Watch it, then watch it again with subtitles to catch the dialogue you missed.
