8 / 10
Official trailer
Seven Psychopaths is the Martin McDonagh-directed crime comedy that became one of the major Irish-Anglo-American genre productions of the early 2010s.
McDonagh wrote and directed. The film was his second feature after In Bruges (2008). Colin Farrell plays Marty, a struggling alcoholic Irish screenwriter trying to write a film called Seven Psychopaths. Sam Rockwell plays Billy, Marty’s best friend and a part-time dog kidnapper. Christopher Walken plays Hans, Billy’s older partner in the dog-kidnapping operation. Woody Harrelson plays Charlie Costello, a Los Angeles gangster whose Shih Tzu Billy has stolen.
Tom Waits plays Zachariah Rigby, a serial killer.
Olga Kurylenko plays Charlie’s girlfriend Angela. Abbie Cornish plays Marty’s girlfriend Kaya. The plot follows Marty’s attempts to write his screenplay, the consequences of Billy and Hans’s dog-kidnapping operation when they take Charlie’s beloved dog, and the gradual collision between Marty’s fictional psychopaths and the actual psychopaths surrounding him.
Mean, silly and show-offy, Seven Psychopaths is a crime comedy I have a blast with. Walken and Rockwell are having so much fun that I forgive most of the times it trips over its own cleverness. The middle gets crowded and the jokes about screenwriting start to pile up, and that’s the gap between an 8 and something higher.
The film made approximately twenty-three million dollars worldwide on a fifteen million dollar budget. The commercial performance was modest. The critical reception was strong, especially among critics engaged with metafiction and genre-aware comedy. The film is consistently cited as a notable McDonagh credit between In Bruges and Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri (2017). The performances by Walken, Rockwell, and Harrelson have drawn particular praise. The film’s metafictional commitment and its tonal management of comedy and violence have established it as one of the more accomplished genre-aware productions of the early 2010s.
The Metafictional Structure
The film works on multiple narrative levels at once. Marty is writing a screenplay called Seven Psychopaths. The film the audience is watching is also called Seven Psychopaths. The fictional psychopaths Marty is trying to invent for his screenplay turn out to be the actual people surrounding him.
The psychopath stories Marty hears throughout the film either become his screenplay material or turn out to be retellings of psychopath stories he’s already supposed to know about. The metafiction isn’t subtle. The film acknowledges its own construction throughout.
The technique is risky. Metafictional cinema often collapses under its own self-awareness. The audience disengages from the story because they’re continuously reminded that the story is constructed. Seven Psychopaths survives the risk by committing to the metafictional content while also delivering on the genre material the metafiction is commenting on. The audience experiences both tones. The crime-genre plot has stakes. The metafictional commentary has wit. The combination isn’t always smooth. The film survives anyway because McDonagh’s specific tonal management keeps the two tones from completely undermining each other.
Most of the time I’m happy to play along. The stretches where Marty’s screenplay and the real psychopaths collide are where I laugh hardest, and the stretches where the film stops to admire its own cleverness are where I start checking the clock.
For Writers
Metafiction works when the writer delivers on the genre being commented on instead of using metafiction as an excuse to abandon genre obligations. Seven Psychopaths is a real crime film and a commentary on crime films at the same time. The lesson is that strong metafiction requires both layers to work. The commentary can’t replace the underlying genre. Build the genre. Then comment on it. The reader gets both. Skipping the underlying genre produces work that only metafiction-engaged readers can enjoy.
The Walken Performance
Christopher Walken plays Hans with sustained understated commitment. The character is the older partner in the dog-kidnapping operation, a man whose calm authority steadies the film’s escalating chaos. Hans’s wife is dying of cancer in a hospital throughout the film. His relationship with her, the philosophical positions he’s developed across his life, and his quiet acceptance of the violence that surrounds him all combine into a much-praised supporting performance from late in Walken’s career.
The Hans character shows Walken’s specific late-career strength. The performance doesn’t draw on the menacing-eccentric persona that defined his middle-career work. Hans is decent, patient, and morally specific. The character’s late-film confession to Charlie Costello about his actual identity as the killer who murdered Charlie’s gangster father decades earlier is one of the film’s most accomplished individual sequences. Walken delivers the confession with sustained quiet that makes the violence underneath it visible.
That confession is the scene I’d rate the whole film on. Walken barely raises his voice, the violence sits right under every word, and I think it’s the finest thing he’s done in his late career. I’d sit through the movie again for those few minutes alone.
For Writers
A performer or writer’s late-career work can deploy against-type material to produce effects their earlier work couldn’t have achieved. Walken’s Hans plays decent and patient. The audience reads both qualities through their accumulated knowledge of Walken’s typical menace. The lesson is that established creative identities can be used as material to work against. Your reader knows what you usually do. Doing something else has impact because of the contrast. Use the accumulated expectations strategically.
The Tonal Management
The film’s most accomplished craft achievement is its sustained tonal management between comedy and violence. McDonagh has been working in this tone since his theatrical career began in the 1990s. The Irish-language Aran Islands plays (The Beauty Queen of Leenane, A Skull in Connemara, The Lonesome West) and the later English-language plays (The Pillowman, The Lieutenant of Inishmore) all work on the comedy-violence intersection. Seven Psychopaths brings the same tone into American cinema.
What the technique involves is staging violent events with the comedic timing of jokes while staging comedic events with the tonal weight of violent ones. The audience laughs at moments designed to be horrific and falls silent during moments designed to be funny. The reversal generates effects that neither pure comedy nor pure violence can produce. The technique requires absolute control. Errors collapse the tone into either flat comedy or excessive grimness. Seven Psychopaths sustains the control for most of its runtime. Some sequences fail. Most succeed.
Most of the time I think McDonagh pulls it off, and when he doesn’t the film goes flat in a hurry. A couple of the middle sequences stack violence on jokes on more jokes until I stop feeling either, and I’d have cut ten minutes from that stretch without losing anything I care about.
For Writers
Tonal management between comedy and violence is among the hardest craft challenges in fiction. Most attempts collapse into either flat comedy or excessive grimness. The lesson is that sustained tonal complexity requires absolute control. Each scene needs specific tonal calibration. The writer can’t run on default settings. Check every scene against what the previous scene established. The audience reads tonal continuity as much as plot continuity. Manage both.
Craft Note
The graveyard sequence is the film’s most-discussed individual passage. Marty, Billy, Hans, and the captured Shih Tzu have retreated to a desert cemetery to wait for Charlie’s mercenaries to arrive. Billy spends the sequence pitching alternative screenplay endings to Marty. Each pitch is a different genre tone: the action-revenge ending, the Buddhist-pacifist ending, the dark-ironic ending, the magical-realism ending. The film stages each pitch as a short sequence the audience watches with full production values before returning to the cemetery.
The film’s metafictional commitment shows most clearly in this technique. The audience experiences the alternative endings as actual sequences while understanding that they’re also Billy’s invented pitches. The cemetery sequence is a tightly economical metafictional set piece of 2010s American cinema and the foundation for the film’s actual closing.
Is Seven Psychopaths worth watching?
An 8, and a fond one. Walken, Rockwell and Harrelson are all in top form, the cemetery sequence of pitched endings is the funniest idea in the film, and McDonagh’s mix of comedy and violence works far more often than it misfires.
It loses points for a crowded middle and for the stretches where the metafiction smothers the crime story it’s supposed to be commenting on, and those stretches frustrate me because the film is sharp enough without them. Watch In Bruges first, then this.
