content warning: discussion of sexual assault“I first tasted semen when I was seven years old.”
That’s the opening line of the 2014 cinematic drama, Calvary. The limited context for the words is poignant. A Catholic priest sitting patiently in a confessional is joined by a mystery figure who perches ordinarily on the other side, and that line is said and the tone is set.
Properly, the movie isn’t a drama. It’s a dark comedy, which is an essential creative choice. Paul Lewis, an English professor at Boston College with a focus on humor, has a no-fat definition of the genre: “a grim joke enjoyed in a dreadful situation.” According to Lewis, a dark joke can only be truly effective if it accomplishes two goals simultaneously. First, it has to provide some amount of relief to the victim of reality. The laugh is, at least theoretically, a redemptive tool for an individual or community in opposition to oppression or suffering.
A subset of dark comedy, gallows comedy, provides the most pointed illustration. A couple years ago, a friend of mine died after a long and painful and circuitous battle with cancer. She never stopped laughing, though. She poked fun at her parents, she joked with her nurses about her physical limitations, she never got too serious for a punchline about her wig. If she was laughing, she was alive, and if she was alive, there was much to be enjoyed. The alternative was too depressive and shortsighted, at least according to my friend. Humor in the face of suffering and death is a guerrilla tactic; it’s a surprise attack against an otherwise dominant enemy. It’s a fragrant whiff of freedom in chains.
I miss a lot about her, but her resilient smile and laughter is high on the list.
Second, dark comedy deliberately undermines someone or something and ought to do so thoughtfully. In other words, who’s laughing matters.
Returning to Calvary, the remainder of the scene in the confessional sets the stage for the plot. The confessor’s experience of sexual abuse was orchestrated by a priest for five years, and though the original perpetrator has since died, the victim has been carrying the weight of it ever since.
In a sadistic attempt to resolve the internal tension and pain, the character has an idea sitting there in the booth:
What good would it do anyway, if [the abusive priest] were still alive? What’d be the point in killing the b******? That’d be no news. There’s no point in killing a bad priest. But killing a good one? That’d be a shock, now. They wouldn’t know what to make of that. I’m going to kill you, father. I’m going to kill you ‘cause you’ve done nothing wrong. I’m going to kill you ‘cause you’re innocent. Not right now, though. I’ll give you enough time to put your house in order. Make your peace with God. Sunday week, let’s say. I’ll meet you down on the beach there. Down by the water there. Killing a priest on a Sunday. That’ll be a good one.
Relief for the victim, of a sort.
But, whom or what is undermined? Who’s laughing at this kind of joke?
Because the viewer doesn’t get to see the confessor, the film plays out as part mystery. We can reasonably narrow down the murderous candidates, but it gets trickier and trickier the more characters get introduced. Not only because of the sheer number. The brazen choices and lifestyles of these seemingly run-of-the-mill townsfolk are difficult to listen to and watch. There are masochistic philanderers. There are laughably (and destructively) wealthy loners. There are numb incels looking for trouble. There are nihilistic atheists. There are influential, religious cowards. The list goes on.
In a place like this with people like this, it becomes foggy who might have experienced a half-decade’s worth of sexual abuse. There’s probably a case to be made it could have been any or all of them.
At the same time, there’s an inescapable feeling to the film. They’re all free-will-wielding adults. They’re making choices, and their choices stand in stark contrast to the small handful of admirable foil characters. There’s the priest, of course, and there are other victims of the harshness of the human experience who respond virtuously to the point of idealism — a young wife, who tragically loses her husband, responds with quiet prayer and hope.
The growing collection of characters in the film is slowly stitched into a brightly colorful tapestry of mundanity. This town seems to be full of ordinary people. People I know; people you know. They’re pressed to the limits of human decisions and feelings to be sure, but they’re us. The darkness of the humor just makes them easier to see, which is uncomfortable for those of us with things to hide.
As the week marches on, the people stay the same, and the priest’s suffering increases. His prodigal daughter returns to town wounded. The church burns down. His dog dies. He admits to knowing his oppressor while acknowledging uncertainty about the right way to respond. Should he involve the police? Might the Holy Spirit intervene? Should he confront the person? Should he run away? Is this how Jesus might have felt?
Despite the urgency of a one-week prognosis, he never seems to be in a rush and fulfills his duties meeting with and caring for the locals, even as they ask for and engage in outlandish things. Faithfulness to the task spurs him on, though his feelings ebb and flow between affection and ambivalence. Yet, the dissonance sitting in his chest crescendos to the point of spilling into a few conversations and relationships.
The genius of the film is that the protagonist is both messianic and ordinary. He bears the weight of the burdens of his parishioners’ faults and wounds, he carries the torment of impending execution, and he makes wise decisions and attempts to be helpful all the while. Yet, he occasionally lashes out, drinks too much, and embraces loneliness (or is it solitary faithfulness?).
Sunday arrives, and the priest’s uncertainty steels into quiet resolve. The shoreline air feels possessed with the priest’s weeklong legion of thoughts and feelings. As hope and curiosity swell in the waiting, they crash when the purposeful movements of the assailant appear on the horizon.
While I will have implicitly spoiled the ending, I’ll limit my description of the climactic scene so you can experience the highs and lows for yourself.
Fittingly, the atonement of the priestly sacrifice is a playful and painful mystery: is it for the failures of the institutional church which has arbitrated abuses the world over, or is it for the grotesque inconsistencies and inadequacies of parishioners like you and me?
We can see ourselves in the priest, in the victim, and in all of the banal, blameworthy bystanders. Who or what is undermined? I think we all are. Which means, we’re rightly laughing at ourselves and the institutions we build, and the humor is tinged with the discomfort of the mirror we’re holding and the reflection we can’t not see.
This is dark comedy at its most potent. We are often the villains and the victims of our own impositions on reality, and while it’s rarely funny, laughter at our own expense might generate a little oxygen for our souls and some much-needed unity.
If that is the genius of the film, then its most moving trait lies downstream in the fruit of the priest’s humble ministry.
A widower before taking his vows, the priest has an adult daughter with a self-destructive streak. Her temptation: unhealthy romance. Her self-imposed punishment: self-harm. Away from the local parish (and beyond the scope of the film), her latest malformative romantic relationship ended in heartbreak. In turn, she slit her wrists, then healed enough to travel.
Her arrival in the film to join her father signals her desire to recover psychologically and, maybe, spiritually.
Hers is a solemn presence, much like her father’s. Men continue to fail her, and she continues to fail herself. Unlike many of her neighbors though, she’s wrestling with remorse and regret. Her countenance dances a fine footwork of jadedness toward life and openness to change, and the priest patiently watches and listens. When he speaks, it’s with few words that are charged with wisdom and hesitancy. He wants better for her than she wants for herself, which is how love tends to work itself out in a broken world. What progress she makes is barely perceptible, maybe even to her, and the overt displays of vicious and virtuous behaviors all around her make the seeds of new life difficult to spot anywhere in the idyllic Irish landscape.
In one of the more relatable movements of the story, the daughter’s character development begins at home. We discover her relationship with her father needs mending. Some of the sad consequences of her background actually began years earlier in her relationships with her mother and father. It turns out, forgiveness for past failures is something they both needed and gently offer. Their discussion is short and vulnerable, but as in real life, reconciliation sets the stage for renewed love and action.
Then, as suddenly as she arrived, her confidant and mentor, her father and priest departed. The nature of that traumatic heartbreak would unavoidably tear at barely healing emotional and psychological wounds. It’s easily imaginable that her life could twist toward a tragic end - she finally has the airtight ammunition of her most cynical reading of the world. A man has tortured her personhood despite her unquestionable innocence. She cannot blame herself, but she can still hurt herself.
And, in a way, she does. Only this time it’s different.
Following the priest’s ceremonious death, there’s one final scene. It’s one of precious few indications of the priest’s influence gaining ground toward redemption. It’s what makes his sacrifice atoning.
The confessor from the film’s opening scene is seated similarly to the confessional but in a different, much more well-lit booth. It’s a prison. From the darkness and unknown of willful confession to the exposure and certainty of the will fighting against love. Opposite the prisoner, this time, is the daughter of the priest.
Their stories converge at an intersection highly conducive to a devastating collision. Will his indulgence of the dark comedic relief of murder spawn a symmetric response aimed back at him? Will her propensity toward implosion in the wake of destructive men finally open the emotional abyss she’s been fending off?
A kind of mortal wound is certain to occur in their interaction. The woman seems primed to offer something of herself; it’d be a form of self-emptying that just might free them from the vices that metastasized around their traumatic experiences.
To borrow from Liz Bruenig, the daughter of the priest just might forsake an emotionally salient set of rights or privileges she acquired when injured. That is to say, as she did with her father, she can extend forgiveness to the priest’s killer, which is a different kind of self-inflicted wound. It’s a selfless forgoing of socially sanctioned and, even, celebrated rights of retribution in order to restore a person who dealt themselves a self-inflicted wound - sin. The forgiver, who wields a powerful social and emotional weapon, instead elevates the sinner back to mutuality and wholeness. For the two characters in the scene, forgiveness can bring an end to their self-imposed spiral toward death, and it can create the subtlest possibility of new life for them both.
This one conversation of two hurting people hints at the mighty, gale-force wind of the Holy Spirit transforming hearts and minds. It is also the pastoral legacy of the priest.
Contrary to stages and microphones and growth metrics and the unshakeable western urge to draw a causal connection from quantity to quality, the work of the Holy Spirit in the context of ministry has a decidedly wind-like knowability. Try as we might, we cannot manufacture what he does or when he does it.
The vigilant visibility of the dregs of human nature in Calvary protect the viewer from bringing a formulaic inclination to the film. That artistic rendering, bordering on but never reaching hopelessness about the prospects of happiness and life change, resonates deeply with the pastoral project. Dark comedy, it seems to me, is the best genre for communicating meaningfully about ministry, at least through the medium of motion picture. The sharp contrasts throw genuine spiritual growth into visible relief, which is what makes the movie so moving. People can change. And, against all odds, priests and pastors have a real role to play in that drama.
The story of the priest and his daughter somehow gets this ethereal, spiritual reality exactly right. The setting of healthful, sustainable spiritual fruit is almost always quiet and slow. Sin and pain will surely pockmark the journey, and much of the personal and pastoral work will inspire hesitancy and curiosity and doubt. Yet, as is the cruciform way of Jesus, just as all hope seems lost, new life remains real and accessible, even for those of us who are our own worst enemy.