The recent 25th anniversary of the Good Friday agreement underscored how much the Troubles, and those many years of bloodshed, have receded into historical memory. With the wounds less raw, it’s easier to mine the period for drama spiked with high-stakes violence and leavened with moral conundrums about justice, loyalty and political expediency. Belfast-born novelist and screenwriter Ronan Bennett is just the right man to map out this terrain. It’s not just his having roots in the region that helps, but also his longtime involvement in British crime drama, from Face back in 1997 through TV series Top Boy, to historical mini-series Gunpowder about the Guy Fawkes plot.
The script for Dead Shot, co-written by Bennett and directors Charles and Thomas Guard, has a crunchy veracity, and feels like it’s getting the details right, especially in how ideology trickles down into daily lives. The direction is perhaps less distinctive, but the bones of something strong, original and evocative are there. Like so many tales of men locked in a lethal dance of destruction by the accidents of war, this revolves around two guys on opposing sides who might have, in another place and time, rather liked each other, but are compelled to destroy one another in this world.
It’s the early 1970s, and O’Hara (Colin Morgan) is an IRA man who gets ambushed while taking his wife Carol (Máiréad Tyers) to the hospital to give birth. In the muddle of moment, poor Carol gets shot by British soldier Tempest (Aml Ameen). Far from punishing him, his superior officer (Mark Strong) has him promoted for being such a dead shot, hence the title, and transferred back to London where he’ll join a unit dedicated to hunting down IRA members behind the bombing campaign. Naturally that’s where O’Hara is headed too. That means he gets to spend time with his girlfriend Ruth (Sophia Brown making a substantial impression with what might have been a stock role); but of course Ruth becomes a target for O’Hara who is bent on revenge, Old Testament-style.
The Guard brothers handle the action set pieces with style, including one at Paddington station, and the period detail is spot on, from the cut of the suits to the look of the phone booths. If the trajectory feels a bit preordained by dramatic convention, there are still stinging twists in store, especially in the last few minutes.
• Dead Shot is available from 12 May on Sky Cinema.
• This article was amended on 9 May 2023 to include the Guard brothers as co-writers of the script, and to correct the date of the film’s setting.
