After a crazy, fun weekend getaway with your friends, you return home utterly exhausted, slightly drunk, and glowing with the joy of having had an amazing time. But when someone asks you what you did, you struggle to put it into words. You laughed until your stomach hurt, survived minor misadventures like falling off tables while dancing, cried, hugged, and enjoyed incredible meals.
How do you even begin to convey the sum of all those feelings, why the weekend was so magical, or how that carnival of emotions painted your experience?
That’s exactly how I feel about the movie Seven Psychopaths. How do I explain why it resonated so much with me, why it’s such a brilliant piece of work, why it made me laugh out loud, yet left me feeling melancholic at the same time?
It’s sheer madness from start to finish—a parade of colorful, eccentric, completely unhinged characters, which is exactly what makes it so beautiful. It’s a film within a film, a screenplay within a screenplay, a cascade of encounters and intersections where dreams and reality blur together.
Even describing the plot feels like an impossible task.
The movie boasts fantastic characters, from the leads to the smallest roles. It features Colin Farrell, one of my all-time favorites, in one of the best films of his career. Christopher Walken, Sam Rockwell, and Woody Harrelson are all phenomenal.
Directed by Irish filmmaker Martin McDonagh, known for In Bruges, Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, and The Banshees of Inisherin, this film perfectly embodies his signature style. Maybe that gives you an idea of what I’m trying to say.
Colin Farrell plays a screenwriter in Los Angeles working on a script about seven psychopaths, though his writing process is going nowhere fast. His close friend Billy, portrayed by Sam Rockwell, is involved in a dog-napping operation alongside Hans, played by Christopher Walken. The pair earn money by stealing dogs and returning them for rewards. But when they cross paths with a ruthless mob boss, played by Woody Harrelson, things take a dangerous turn. I’ll leave the rest of the chaos for you to discover.