The Wind That Shakes The Barley Review

I didn’t like much the film because I feel like the director focus a little too much on the duality of the two brothers fighting for the liberation of Ireland and their opposite views on how the conflict should be resolved. Basically, one brother is willing to compromise with England and the other doesn’t.

 They both have very good reasons to fight, like when the english soldiers gratuitously killed a neighbor of theirs, but we don’t spent much time to know the people they are fighting for besides the one "hockey-like" game they are all playing at the beginning of the film. 

At one point, one of the brothers, Damien, shot a friend he knew his entire life, who betrayed him and his brother. And then he tells his future wife about the time he went to vist the mother of his friend, to tell her where she could find her son’s grave. At the grave, the mother told Damien to never show his face again to her. So when a similar situation happened between Damien and his brother, the tension of the situation is defused, at least to me. 

The tragic story falls flat because it felt too conventional. The duality of the brothers is expressed almost entirely through dialogue without much of use of the rest of the cinematic tools to tell a story. I’m not a big fan of the shot-reverse shot when it’s use so predominantly functional in a film like this.

I like Damien’s character reluctance but I find he gets over it very quickly. And gruesome as it was, I like the scene when the characters got caught and Damien’s brother is tortured, because it consolidated the group’s resolve to fight the English.