By Cosmo Jarvis portrays Arm, a former boxer who, with limited options available to him, has become a brutal enforcer for the drug-dealing Devers family. He is also trying to be a present father for his young autistic son, a balancing act that becomes increasingly hard to perform as his role with the Devers because more and more dangerous.
Calm With Horses strives to be a modern-day Irish version of On the Waterfront, following a once talented fighter as they struggle to make a life for themselves once they have fallen out of the profession that was the only thing that they knew how to do well. It is a tale filled with a lot of darkness, and that darkness often explodes to the fore in quite a violent fashion. It means that a lot of Calm With Horses can be quite a gruelling experience, as it heads down a bloody road of redemption.
Much of the crime drama beats, while certainly delivered in fashion that gets under your skin thanks to the tactility of the setting and the violence, is still operating largely in crime drama cliche. It may be downbeat and a drama that takes itself very seriously, but it is all largely predictable if you’ve seen similarly styled kitchen sink dramas before.
Full review at THN, originally published March 9th 2020.
Andrew Gaudion 