In his first appearance as a writer-director Neil Jordan laid down a marker as to what was to come in his career, casting signature actor Stephen Rea as Danny, a showband saxophonist shocked by the senseless terrorist shooting of an innocent waif outside a border country dance hall. As he would throughout his subsequent career however, Jordan challenges the audience’s easy moral assumptions when Danny, transformed into an angel of vengeance, leaves his own bloody trail, lost in a miasma of contradictions once he picks up a gun himself. Confrontational, spare, and poetic, Jordan’s courageous foray into the dark psychic chasm at the heart of the Troubles remains an indelible landmark in Irish film.

Notes by Trevor Johnston.