Middletown
15, 85 mins

The fire and brimstone preacher played by Matthew Macfadyen in Middletown makes Peter Fonda’s trench-coated Devil seem the picture of civility. A great cast turns this small Protestant parish in the 1960s into an unbearable place to live. Jim (Daniel Mays) and his pregnant wife (Eva Birthistle) are scraping by with what she earns as a barmaid, and whatever cheap diesel he can buy to feed his petrol pumps. Entertainment is fitfully supplied by illegal cockfights and lock-ins on the Sabbath.

The return of Jim’s older brother to Northern Ireland is a profound shock. Gabriel left as a boy to pursue a religious vocation preordained for him by his father. He returns a seasoned Paisleyite minister with a zeal that tears his family and parish apart. Gabriel sees iniquity and vice in the most rudimentary compromises. When a glass of beer is thrown in his face he goes back to the manse and scrubs himself with a metal scouring brush.

Brian Kirk’s film is almost too black and white for awkward questions. Maybe that’s as it should be. Macfadyen is quite insane. But Mays — one of my favourite British actors — is terrific as the beleaguered younger brother left to rot by his father and ostracised by his friends. His crumpled face and crushed expectations are the whole point of the sermon, bleak though it is.

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