Reviewed by Catherine Bisley (2nd take)

KEN LOACH’s latest film, The Wind That Shakes the Barley, is a sharp polemic that follows the story of a young Irish doctor, Damien (Cillian Murphy), who joins the IRA to fight along side his brother, Teddy (Padriac Delaney), during the Irish War of Independence. Not for the faint hearted, the film depicts the unrelenting and unprovoked violence of the Black and Tans: a boy is beaten to death when he refuses to state his name in English; a toadlike officer beats an old train conductor, his white fleshy face trembling with hatred. The IRA’s use of violence is equally troubling: “I feel nothing” says Damian after shooting a young informer who he grew up with.


Murphy acts with finesse, his startling grey eyes and body language augmenting Paul Laverty’s script to convey the terrible conflicts Damien faces. Sinead (Orla Fitzgerald), who Damien becomes involved with, functions far beyond a mere love interest: Loach’s approach plays on multiple levels. He scores the conflict through character relationships, with the major historical turning points of the Irish conflict occurring on the film’s periphery. The dialogue is astute and natural, with Loach and Laverty’s trademark use of humour in the midst of terrible situations put to good use. A young boy on a bike empties his pockets trying to find the message he was given – a message that contained an important word beginning with “t”. He pulls out a long piece of string and many other things you’d expect a young tyke to have in his pockets. The message is eventually found on the road – the word is truce.

Looking back on these events, it is easy to condemn and recognise wrong-footed ideology. The film speaks because Loach does not judge or moralise; he gives each character a voice. It is noted, for example, that many of the English soldiers had just returned from the horrors of WWI’s trenches. In a potent scene IRA combatants look on the bodies of English soldiers they have ambushed and killed with horror. Nuanced parallels and contrasts abound throughout the film. After the signing of the Anglo-Irish Treaty in 1921, we see the men and women that fought together against the British turn on each other. Free Staters usurp the Black and Tans as the oppressors. Senseless violence continues, with the combatants on either side getting younger and younger. Damien and Teddy are opposed. Death and Terror reign.

A Catholic high-school education gave me a strong aversion to Irish kitsch. While the film is steeped in Irishness, it is a relief that it doesn’t indulge. Filmed on location in County Cork, the cinematography poetically renders the green rocky hills with their wild flowers and tussock and the tree lined roads, thus providing a counterpoint to the menacing violence of the grey jail cells and combat that occurs within these landscapes. Loach directs with acute emotional understanding, at times pulling back to wide shots, while at others honing in to close-up. In these close-ups the camera is rarely still, panning from one detail to the next. This is not an easy tear jerker. Loach wants us to think.

In a harrowing prison scene the captured men sing to galvanise the group and support Teddy, who is being tortured. Music is used to protest: the title folk tune “The Wind That Shakes the Barley” contains messages of revolution. On the other hand the use of non-diagetic sound is flawed. Tending towards the melodramatic, the score often drew away from, rather than added to, the scenes it accompanied. The film’s pace often did not always match the breadth of the script or the quality of the camerawork: the editor could have allowed more space.

As I left the theatre an Irish girl near me commented “It’s so close to home. It’s still so divided”. In these days of Good and Evil where any resistance to invasion or occupation is branded terrorism, The Wind That Shakes the Barley presents a predicament that resonates beyond Ireland’s borders and beyond war:

...So I turned to the Garden Of Love
That so many sweet flowers bore,

And I saw it was filled with graves
And tombstones where flowers should be;
And priests in black gowns were walking their rounds
And binding with briars my joys and desires.