In the Land of Saints and Sinners 2024 Movie Review
In the Land of Saints and Sinners, Liam Neeson stars as the weary hitman Finbar Murphy, who lives in a small village on the Irish coast. We are in the 1970s, when the IRA is fully active and divisions among the population are strongly felt. There has been a lot of bad blood and there are many loose ends. Finbar thinks he’s had enough with making victims and wants to hang his gun on the wall. The best man wants nothing more than to retire. At the grocery store, the hitman murmurs that he has come for seeds because he wants to learn how to garden. It all works out just a little bit differently.
The ruggedness of the landscape is reflected in the grooves of the faces of the handful of residents of the coastal village of Glencolmcille. The images of Ireland are beautiful and the landscape comes out in all its glory. There are beautiful views of the rolling green hills and the crashing waves of the pristine coast. The narrow streets with their crumbling walls and medieval pebbles are depicted authentically. The background decor consists of details such as a dusty bookstore with blue shutters. As a Northern Irishman, Liam Neeson clearly feels completely at home there.
The film proceeds as quietly as a detective; the tone is mainly reflective. Liam Neeson plays his character so sympathetically that you immediately forgive him for becoming a hitman. There is a rustic ambivalence in the seasoned sixties. On the one hand he can shoot people in cold blood, on the other hand he knows exactly what is and is not appropriate when he dines with his neighbor and her terminally ill husband. It is clear that he looks at her rather glowingly and actually has a crush on her, but he is also aware that it is not nice to hit on her in this situation. He patiently teaches central police officer Vincent O’Shea how to hit the target. He chats fatherly with his neighbor Moya and takes good care of his cat. He is a rock for those around him and, in short, a sympathetic and friendly guy.
However, Finbar is the ultimate embodiment of Dr. Jekyll and also has a dark Mr. Hyde side. He hides his own cemetery of victims. He constructed the graveyard in a remote area and planted a bush near each victim that grew into a tree. It is this display of ‘cheerfulness’ and ‘cleanliness’ (his victims are allowed to say something for two minutes, he has an egg timer as a timer) that makes him tragic: a hitman who wants to offer his victims a nice funeral and with a concerned face the pulls the trigger. One of his last victims advises him to do something good with his life for God’s sake.
His only colleague in Glencolmcille, the rambunctious young Kevin Lynch (excellently played by Jack Gleeson, who also understood the restlessness of bullies well as Joffrey in Game of Thrones ) is more what you would expect from an assassin. Initially, Kevin seems like a shot-up, unpredictable and bloodthirsty little guy. He is not bothered by humanity or empathy. Finbar’s boss protests that Finbar cannot retire because he would be left alone with that unguided missile.
There is friction between the two. Finbar takes his profession seriously and concludes in a fatherly but angry manner that this young dog is disrespectful and out of his mind. Kevin confronts Finbar with his cognitive dissonance. According to him, Finbar is hiding behind the decorum of a funeral home, but how many people has he skillfully shot dead in the meantime? Or as Kevin notes (after a sermon by Finbar on the preservation of human dignity): an entire forest is now growing in that cemetery.
It is mainly the dynamic between Finbar and Kevin that gives this film its depth. Finbar is a dark river inside because of all the bloodshed, while Kevin is actually still a flowing stream. The difference between perpetrators and victims is diffuse. Things turn out not to be so simple or black and white in the endless cycle of mutual retaliation. At the same time, it is not Finbar’s past that keeps him from retirement, but an event in the present that he interferes with. There are no skeletons rattling in his closet, ghosts hunting him or relatives seeking revenge, preventing him from sleeping peacefully. The film would have been more exciting and complicated if this had been the case. The threat comes from three IRA members who fled to Glencomille after committing an attack. They’re brand new in Finbar’s life, but the goons are barely putting up a fight.
Ultimately, the storyline is thinly spun and has few unexpected twists. The riled up bad guys are mainly riled up bad guys, the friendly neighbor is limited to the friendly neighbor. Finbar’s pangs of conscience do not get an appropriate denouement. His accumulated secrets, which seemed to be the premise of the film, also do not come to light. There is no return from all that Finbar has hidden. You can forgive the makers for this, mainly because of the strength of the actors, who portray the characters with all their shortcomings and vulnerabilities in a very human way.
A funny detail is that Finbar’s cat is constantly being taken to safety. He is often at the house of the former hitman, present when the IRA members break in, falls asleep on Kevin’s lap as a guest and is eventually brought as a present to the girl next door, Moya. He has never been given a name and she thinks he is typical Séan. Most thrillers and detective novels do not take the time to answer the question of whether the pets are kept out of harm’s way.
The history of Ireland with its bloody conflicts is not explored in depth, but that is not necessary, the church appears at just the right moment. A harmonious harbour, an endless divisive issue, a source of peace and unrest. If you want to lose yourself in the atmospheric folklore of Ireland, visit In the Land of Saints and Sinnershis luck doesn’t run out.
