I Went Down

I Went Down is a 1997 Irish comedy-thriller road movie directed by Paddy Breathnach and written by the playwright Conor McPherson, in which a newly released Dublin prisoner is sent by a crime boss to Cork with a volatile partner to find a fugitive associate.¹ It stars Brendan Gleeson and Peter McDonald, with Peter Caffrey and Tony Doyle in supporting roles.² The film was a commercial and critical success in Ireland and abroad, winning festival prizes at San Sebastián and Thessaloniki and, by mid-1998, becoming the highest-grossing independent Irish film to that point.³

Production and creative team

The film marked the cinema debut of its screenwriter, the young Irish playwright Conor McPherson, and the second feature for director Paddy Breathnach after Ailsa.⁵ It was produced by Robert Walpole for Treasure Entertainment, with the Irish Film Board (Bord Scannán na hÉireann) and Euskal Media among the production companies; the press kit for Breathnach's later film Rosie also credits BBC Films on I Went Down.^{2 • 8} The crew included cinematographer Cian de Buitléar, editor Emer Reynolds, and composer Dario Marianelli.⁴

The film had its world premiere in the Cannes market in May 1997, where The Irish Times critic Michael Dwyer reported it "going down very well indeed" and described it as "the Coen brothers meet Roddy Doyle".⁹ It opened in Irish cinemas that October.⁵

Style and structure

The film is a hybrid of the buddy road movie and the gangster picture, and it opens with a quotation from Plato's The Republic ("I went down to Peiraeus yesterday with Glaucon, the son of Ariston"), from which it takes its title; the words return in the final scene.^{10 • 5} The story is divided into thematic chapters introduced by white-on-black title cards, such as "This is what I need you to do to make it right" and "A rendezvous with a friendly face".¹⁰

Critics consistently identified dialogue and character rather than plot as the film's strength. Roger Ebert, longtime film critic of the Chicago Sun-Times and winner of the 1975 Pulitzer Prize for criticism, wrote that it is "a crime movie in which the dialogue is a great deal more important than anything else", rating it three of four stars.¹¹ The Los Angeles Times praised Brendan Gleeson as "a seriocomic powerhouse in the central role".⁷ The Film Ireland reviewer Gerry McCarthy noted that the film distinguishes Dublin and Cork as separate worlds, each with its own accent, appearance, and criminal style, and avoids tying its gangster plot to contemporary Irish social issues.¹²

Reception and awards

At the 45th San Sebastián International Film Festival in 1997, where the film screened in the Official Section, it took five nominations and four wins: the Prize of the Jury to Paddy Breathnach as Best New Director, the CEC Award for Best Screenplay, and a FIPRESCI Special Mention.^{1 • 4} Breathnach also won Best Director at the Thessaloniki Film Festival in 1997 and at the Bogotá Film Festival in 1998, and the film screened at Sundance in 1998.^{1 • 8} Brendan Gleeson won Best Actor from the Boston Society of Film Critics in 1998, and at the 1999 IFTA awards the film received four nominations and two wins, for Best Screenplay and for Best Craft Contribution to cinematographer Cian de Buitléar.¹

Commercially, the Los Angeles Times reported in July 1998 that the film had become the highest-grossing independent Irish film ever.³ A PhD thesis on contemporary Irish cinema at Dublin City University records that it premiered at number 1 on its rental release.¹³ On the review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes it holds an 84% Tomatometer from 19 critics and an 87% audience score, and its Metacritic Metascore is 69, in the "generally favorable" range.^{6 • 7}

Place in Irish cinema

I Went Down is counted among the cycle of late-1990s Irish films that reappropriated male-oriented crime and gangster genres within an Irish setting, alongside titles such as The General (1998) and Intermission (2003).¹³ A 2006 DCU thesis by Debbie Ging, now a professor at Dublin City University's School of Communications, places it at the start of this trend, in which Irish filmmakers adopted commercially proven genre formats during the Celtic Tiger era.¹³ Its road-movie form has also been read as a self-reflexive acknowledgment of American genre influence on Irish cinema, playing the great American road-movie tradition out across the Irish countryside.¹²

References

1. I Went Down, Treasure Entertainment
2. I Went Down, Irish Film & Television Network filmography
3. Petty Crooks Beguile in Irish 'Down', Los Angeles Times, 1 July 1998
4. I Went Down, San Sebastián Film Festival 1997 Official Section
5. Bunny and Git steal the show, The Irish Times, 3 October 1997
6. I Went Down, Rotten Tomatoes
7. I Went Down critic reviews, Metacritic
8. Production Team Biographies, Rosie press kit
9. The good, the bad and the smug, The Irish Times, 14 May 1997
10. Plucky Charms, The Washington Post, 2 July 1998
11. I Went Down movie review & film summary, RogerEbert.com, 1 July 1998
12. Review: I Went Down, Film Ireland 61 (Oct/Nov 1997)
13. Debbie Ging (2006), The Lads from New Ireland, PhD thesis, Dublin City University

Topic: Encyclopedia › Arts and culture › Screen and stage › Film and television › Films and standalone screen works › Individual films by title and year › Crime, thriller, and mystery films (individual works) › 1990s films › Crime comedies and capers

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026 · Last review: Oct 25, 2026

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