General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 202610 min read

Resurrection Man

Resurrection Man is a 1994 novel by the Northern Irish writer Eoin McNamee, a fictionalisation of the Shankill Butchers killings in mid-1970s Belfast, and the title of its 1998 film adaptation directed by Marc Evans from McNamee's own screenplay. The novel follows Victor Kelly, a killer modeled on the Butchers' leader Lenny Murphy, as his gang evolves out of a unit of the loyalist paramilitary Ulster Volunteer Force, while two local journalists, Ryan and Coppinger, try to map the sectarian violence of the city.¹

Key fact	Detail
Novel	Resurrection Man, Eoin McNamee, 1994; a fictionalisation of the Shankill Butchers killings of the mid-1970s¹
Protagonist	Victor Kelly, modeled on the Butchers' leader Lenny Murphy; the gang emerges from a unit of the Ulster Volunteer Force¹
Film	Directed by Marc Evans, screenplay by Eoin McNamee, Revolution Films, 35mm, released 13 February 1998 (UK)²^•³
Principal cast	Stuart Townsend (Victor Kelly), James Nesbitt (Ryan), Geraldine O'Rawe, John Hannah, Derek Thompson, Brenda Fricker²
Crew	Music David Holmes; cinematography Pierre Aim⁴
Reception	IMDb 5.4/10; Rotten Tomatoes tomatometer 65% from 3 reviews; estimated budget $4,000,000⁵^•⁶
Classification	R 18+ in Australia (medium level violence); rated 18 in the UK⁷^•³

Spoilers

Plot

Belfast, 1976. Victor Kelly (Stuart Townsend) is a Protestant from the Shankill Road with a Catholic surname, a detail that has earned him a lifetime of jibes and beatings from his own side, and left him with a pathological hatred of Catholics and a cocaine habit.¹⁸ He models himself on James Cagney and John Dillinger, dressing like a movie gangster, preening in mirrors, fussing over his hair and his teeth while the city around him counts its dead.² With a small crew of loyalist (protestant supporter of Northern Ireland remaining in the UK) thugs he cruises the night streets, abducting people at random and torturing and killing them. The press dubs the gang the Resurrection Men, and the city becomes afraid of its own sidewalks.¹⁹

The killings are not operations; they are appetites. In one scene that has become the film's signature, the gang drags a random Catholic off the street and parades him around a loyalist pub while the patrons take turns punching him, ordinary drinkers lining up for their go, before Kelly puts him out of his misery by slitting his throat in the pub's toilet. The scene implicates not just the killers but the whole community that cheers them on and stays close-lipped when the police come asking.²⁰ Elsewhere the violence is staged with freeze frames, distorted angles, and near-silence, the sounds of the act itself doing the work that music would normally do.¹⁰

Ryan (James Nesbitt), a local reporter increasingly fascinated by the gang, finally comes face to face with the killer in a derelict bath house shot to resemble a vampire's castle: oppressive architecture, a looming door, rain lashing the walls, the camera eroticizing Victor as he moves through the gloom with an almost vampiric chill. It is the film's thesis in one image, the monster as glamour object, the decent man drawn toward the thing he should be running from.²¹ Around this meeting the two men's stories braid together, each caught in the other's web, Ryan's curiosity curdling into complicity the longer he stays close.²²

After Victor participates in the torture and murder of a Catholic prisoner, his spree attracts the attention of loyalist paramilitary commander Sammy McClure (Seán McGinley), who encourages the anti-Catholic killing rather than reining it in. After Victor participates in the torture and murder of a Catholic prisoner, the law finally closes in, but he escapes conviction by smothering his accomplice, the only eyewitness, in prison. His mother (Geraldine O'Rawe) watches her son with coiled dread, knowing what he is and unable to say it.¹⁸

The film does not end with an arrest or a trial. Victor, untouchable in life, is shot dead by unnamed gunmen, presumably the Provisional IRA, while visiting his mother. His own side, the machinery that used him, is the only institution that finally stops him, and only once he has become a liability rather than a weapon.¹⁸

Characters

Victor Kelly (Stuart Townsend) is the film's engine: vain, giggly, oddly childish, a void with good cheekbones who flips from foppish charm to murder in a breath. He has no politics beyond the pleasure of the blade; the sectarian conflict is simply the license that lets him operate. Townsend plays him without ever asking the audience for sympathy or explanation, and the performance was widely praised as the film's centerpiece.²²

Ryan (James Nesbitt) is the journalist and the film's one access point for a decent viewer, a man whose professional fascination with the killer drifts toward complicity. Geraldine O'Rawe plays Victor's mother, dread worn as a label rather than developed. Seán McGinley is Sammy McClure, the paramilitary commander who finds Victor's appetite useful. Brenda Fricker and John Hannah appear in the film's half-lit orbit of bar-room associates and hangers-on.

Interpretations and controversies

The film provoked protest in Northern Ireland, walkouts by British critics at previews, and denunciations from Sinn Féin and from loyalist parties including the UDP and the PUP, which objected to the portrayal of the loyalist community. Radio 4 presenter Paul Gambaccini admitted on air that he had walked out of a screening because he could not take the violence. Producer Andrew Eaton defended the film by arguing that the lack of motive was the point: the real Shankill Butchers had no motive either.¹⁰ Critics also attacked the poster's calculated mock warning, "Rated 18 for scenes of violence and torture," as an enticement dressed as a caution.²¹ The film later started a debate about a cinematic deficit in which loyalists are represented unfavourably and less often than republicans in Troubles films.²⁰

The novel

McNamee wrote the book in a panoramic, noirish and postmodern style that deconstructs and fractures the cinematic, political, legal and sectarian discourses on the conflict, revealing their provisionality as text. A 2024 study in the Journal of Multicultural Discourses argues that the novel is acutely interested in the ways violence is transcribed into text, and that its depictions of the media satirise attempts to contain historical explanations of the Troubles exclusively within the region's inherent sectarianism.¹

Media critique. In the novel's newspapers, paramilitary violence is represented as tautological: Northern Ireland is violent because its people are intractably violent and sectarian. This matches what the study calls the 'Two Tribes' theory of the conflict, which locates its origins solely in two 'inherently unreasonable' tribes and their religiously motivated bigotry; John Whyte estimated in 1990 that this 'internal conflict interpretation' was used by 63 percent of the social and political science literature produced since the Troubles began.¹ The novel's news coverage decouples events from their political context and immediate causes, so that violence appears, in Liz Curtis's phrase, as random as a natural disaster or accident; imagery shifts from riots and exploding bombs to blood-soaked pavements, plastic sheeting and funerals, framing perpetrators as criminals without political motives.¹

Against this isolationist framing, McNamee creates discursive encounters between Ulster and trouble spots around the world, connecting paramilitary violence with British imperial history and the history of armed conflict in the twentieth century. In a much-quoted speech, a character tells a journalist: "We're the boys built the Empire and got a kick in the arse for it. Write about that. Ulster loyal and true. That's a thing to die for."¹

The novel has attracted criticism as well as praise. Gerry Smyth, troubled that the violence is attributed to an 'unchanging and elemental' sense of evil, argues that the book finally reveals itself as another reactionary response to the Troubles, interested not in sectarianism but in some inscrutable darkness at the heart of the self.⁸

The film adaptation

The film was produced by Revolution Films, shot on 35mm, and released in the United Kingdom on 13 February 1998. Credits differ on the producer: the Australian Classification database and Plex list Andrew Eaton, while the British Council UK Films Database lists Michael Winterbottom as both producer and executive producer.⁷^•³^•² The British Council synopsis describes Victor Kelly as "a gangster and ruthless murderer - a 'Scarface' for the 90's", modeling himself on Cagney and Dillinger, whose cruelty makes him a ghastly local legend, both feared and venerated, while the journalist Ryan pursues the truth about the so-called 'Resurrection Men' at risk to his own life.²

Style. Ryan Gilbey, reviewing in The Independent, described the film as being about violence, its irrationality and its glamour, set in a 1975 Belfast re-imagined in the style of a penny dreadful (cheap Victorian serial fiction full of lurid crime and violence), with eerie mist in daylight and sordid eruptions of color at night. He noted Evans's unusual daring in portraying brutality itself as a character, with Townsend's Victor Kelly becoming something like a physical embodiment of violence, often held in tight close-up staring at the camera.⁹ Producer Andrew Eaton said the violence was deliberately stylised with freeze frames, distorted angles and music, and that it was far less gruesome than the reality; once the nature of the violence was established, it became less evident as the story proceeded.¹⁰ A later academic account notes that the film oscillates between gangster and horror genres, with Kelly embodying gangster and vampire at once.¹¹

Controversy. The film was attacked for portraying a loyalist gang as nothing more than psychopaths motivated by a lust for violence.¹⁰ It was called a "nauseating exercise" and "an outpouring of anti-Unionist hatred", and enjoyed the rare distinction of uniting political opponents when a Sinn Féin spokesperson joined members of the Ulster Democratic Party and the Progressive Unionist Party in denouncing it as 'irresponsible'.¹¹ McNamee later told The Irish Times that the film was "censored out of existence", with only one cinema in Belfast defiantly playing it to packed houses for weeks; visiting one night, he found it full of children in Rangers jerseys, locked onto the screen, which he took as validating the film.¹² Time Out's review judged that the filmmakers could not decide whether the film was a political work, a genre thriller, or a study of violent psychopaths, leaving it open to charges of sensationalist exploitation.¹³ The BFI later grouped it with films that unintentionally glamorised violent thugs.¹⁴

Reception. The film holds an IMDb rating of 5.4/10 from about 890 votes and a Rotten Tomatoes tomatometer of 65 percent from three reviews, with an audience score of 61 percent on Moviefone.⁵^•⁶^•¹⁵ It was classified R 18+ in Australia on 2 October 1997 for medium level violence, with a listed duration of 101 minutes.⁷ Its soundtrack work, by the music production team of David Holmes, Gary Burns and Keith Tenniswood with Foley artist Diane Greaves, has been described as a significant interruption of established soundtrack conventions for Troubles-based narratives, blurring the boundary between original music and sound design.¹⁶

Legacy

The novel is now studied as a key Troubles text from the beginning of the peace process, one that widens the set of referents for the conflict's violence to include decolonisation and the legacies of empire rather than confining them to internal sectarianism.¹ The film's release in 1998 coincided with a resurgence of loyalist terrorism, and it has been critiqued for the reductive associations it draws between political violence and criminality and for reinforcing images that link Ulster loyalism with vampirism.¹⁷^•¹⁶

References

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 › Thrillers › Released 1996 to 1999

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 21, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026 · Last review: Oct 25, 2026

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