In Bruges | On the Road to Wild Horse Nine

Martin McDonagh’s new film Wild Horse Nine arrives in cinemas on 5 November. Ahead of its release, we present In Bruges, the 2008 feature debut in which McDonagh immediately established his unmistakable voice.

After a job goes disastrously wrong, Irish hitmen Ray and Ken are ordered to disappear for a while. Their boss Harry sends them to Bruges, where they must wait in a small hotel for further instructions. Ken sees a beautiful historic city and eagerly explores its churches, art and canals. Ray finds Bruges boring, suffocating and a particularly bad place to be left alone with his thoughts.

While Ken plays tourist, Ray looks for distractions on a film set and meets Chloë. His past, however, refuses to remain buried. When Harry finally calls, it becomes clear that their stay in Bruges is no accidental stopover. The city turns into a waiting room in which guilt, loyalty and conscience become increasingly difficult to separate.

In Bruges may be a crime film filled with hitmen and gunfire, but its heart lies in the friendship between Ray and Ken. Colin Farrell and Brendan Gleeson are funny, uncomfortable and moving as two men dealing very differently with what they have done. Ralph Fiennes completes the trio as the furious yet surprisingly principled Harry. Dutch actress Thekla Reuten also appears in a supporting role.

Everything that would come to define McDonagh’s later films is already here: razor-sharp dialogue, pitch-black humour and characters who continue to follow their own peculiar rules even when everything has fallen apart. The screenplay won a BAFTA and earned McDonagh his first Academy Award nomination for a feature film.

From the wintry streets of Bruges to the Easter Island setting of Wild Horse Nine, Martin McDonagh likes to send his characters somewhere beautiful where they cannot escape themselves. See where his feature-film career began at Natlab before his latest film arrives in cinemas.