Irish feature film Calm With Horses will be streaming on Netflix in Ireland and the UK from Monday, 26th October. The award-winning thriller, starring Barry Keoghan, Niamh Algar and Cosmo Jarvis will make perfect bank holiday viewing.
Calm With Horses, a drama set in rural Ireland, is the directorial feature debut of Nick Rowland, whose previous work includes Slap, a Bafta-nominated short film, and television episodes of the BBC prime time drama Hard Sun and Amazon’s Ripper Street.
Joe Murtagh adapted the script from a short story in Young Skins, an acclaimed collection by Irish writer Colin Barrett.
Cast includes Cosmo Jarvis (Lady Macbeth, Annihilation) as Arm, Barry Keoghan (Dunkirk, The Killing of a Sacred Deer) as his business partner Dympna Devers, and Niamh Algar (The Drummer and the Keeper, The Virtues) as Arm’s ex-partner. Additional cast include Ned Dennehy (Mandy, Peaky Blinders), David Wilmot (Anna Karenina, Calvary), and Simone Kirby (Notes on Blindness, Jimmy’s Hall).
DMC Film (Slow West, Macbeth, Assassin’s Creed), the production company founded by Michael Fassbender and Conor McCaughan, developed the project with Film4.
Daniel Emmerson produced, with Fassbender and McCaughan serving as executive producers, for DMC. Further executive producers were Ed Guiney and Andrew Lowe for Element Pictures (Room, The Favourite), Sam Lavender, Sue Bruce-Smith and Daniel Battsek for Film4, Will Clarke and Mike Runagall for Altitude, Celine Haddad for Screen Ireland, and Sarah Dillon for the WRAP Fund. Element’s Rory Gilmartin (Rosie) and Kate Glover (Black Mirror, McMafia) served as coproducers.
Key crew included casting director Shaheen Baig (Lady Macbeth, God’s Own Country) director of photography Piers McGrail (Never Grow Old, The Cured), production designer Damien Creagh (Yardie, Notes on Blindness), costume designer Sharon Long (Guardians of the Galaxy, Jack the Giant Slayer), and hair and makeup designer Emma Scott (In Fabric, ’71). The editors were Nicolas Chaudeurge (Still Alice, Fish Tank) and Matthew Tabern (Top Boy).
Electronic musician Blanck Mass composed the film’s soundtrack. First coming to prominence as half of cult band Fuck Buttons, Blanck Mass has toured internationally, and worked on various musical projects, including the opening ceremony of the 2012 Olympics for Danny Boyle.
Calm With Horses was filmed on location in the counties of Galway and Clare in Ireland.