Synopsis
The Butcher Boy (1998) is Neil Jordan's pitch-black tragicomedy you can watch online on iFILM. Told through the voice of Francie Brady — a cheeky kid in a small Irish town in the early 1960s — it follows a boy whose world slowly slides into madness.
Home is rough: his father drinks, his mother fights a crushing depression. What keeps Francie going is his friendship with Joe and a head full of comics, cowboys and atomic-bomb daydreams. Then a neighbor, Mrs Nugent, calls the Bradys pigs and trash, and the insult curdles into obsession. The more reality cracks, the deeper Francie retreats into invention — right down to visions of the Virgin Mary, played by singer Sinéad O'Connor.
Jordan adapted Patrick McCabe's cult novel, and the film walks a razor edge between hilarious and unbearably bleak. Twelve-year-old Eamonn Owens carries the whole thing, with Stephen Rea, Fiona Shaw and Brendan Gleeson alongside him. Not a film for everyone: harsh, strange, and impossible to shake. Stream The Butcher Boy (1998) online on iFILM.
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