Curator Watchlist
The Field
A fierce, old-world tragedy about land, pride, and inheritance, driven by Richard Harris’s towering performance. It’s slow-burn and grim, but the emotional and moral force is unmistakable.
Curator Watchlist
A fierce, old-world tragedy about land, pride, and inheritance, driven by Richard Harris’s towering performance. It’s slow-burn and grim, but the emotional and moral force is unmistakable.
Where to watch: Buy
Fri · 1h 50m
Director: Jim Sheridan
Starring: Richard Harris, John Hurt, Sean Bean
"Bull" McCabe's family has farmed a field for generations, sacrificing much in the name of the land. When the widow who owns the field decides to sell it in a public auction, McCabe knows that he must own it. While no local dare bid against him, a wealthy American decides he requires the field to build a highway. "Bull" and his son decide they must try to convince the American to let go of his ambition and return home, but the consequences of their plot prove sinister.
Jim Sheridan
Richard Harris, John Hurt, Sean Bean
A fierce, old-world tragedy about land, pride, and inheritance, driven by Richard Harris’s towering performance. It’s slow-burn and grim, but the emotional and moral force is unmistakable.
The Field is a severe, elemental drama that treats land not as property but as blood memory, inheritance, and curse. Jim Sheridan stages the story with a tragic patience, letting the weight of years settle into every glance, silence, and threat. What begins as a dispute over an auction becomes something older and darker: a portrait of a man who has built his identity so completely around possession that he can no longer imagine life without it.
Richard Harris gives the film its thunder. His Bull McCabe is monstrous, magnetic, and pitiable all at once, a patriarch whose devotion to the field curdles into obsession. John Hurt and Sean Bean are strong foils, but the film belongs to Harris, whose performance has the scale of a folk legend and the intimacy of a family wound. The result is less a conventional drama than a rural tragedy, with the landscape itself seeming to judge the people who fight over it.
It can feel austere and stage-bound, and its rhythms are deliberately severe, but that formality suits the material. The Field is about inheritance in every sense: land passed down, violence passed down, silence passed down. If you respond to films that turn local conflict into something mythic and devastating, this is a powerful one.
Sam (3.5★) · 145 likes
This is what Ireland does to people.
FakeVoorhees (4.5★) · 86 likes
Between The Banshees of Inisherin, How Harry Became a Tree and The Field, I am loving these movies about personal feuds in rural Ireland in the early 1900s. That may be oddly specific but does anyone know of any others I should check out?
Mark Cunliffe 🇵🇸 (4★) · 80 likes
Richard Harris effectively gives us his Lear as Irish farmer Bull McCabe in this superb film from My Left Foot director Jim Sheridan. It's arguably one of the finest performances that Harris ever committed to celluloid and he was rightly nominated for an Oscar in 1991. He lost out to Jeremy Irons for Reversal of Fortune. I haven't seen that film, but in my view Irons must have been exceptional to steal the Oscar from Harris. A footnote; there is… more
egg shrimp (3★) · 66 likes
*in full daylight* sean bean: the sun is coming up
Ziglet_mir (2.5★) · 62 likes
This week on The Searchers film podcast we raise a glass to the Green with the 1990 film, The Field, directed by Jimmy Sheridan. We celebrate the Irish so hard I actually lost my voice for two days! Hear Ben, Kevin and I discuss films adapted as plays as well as the Irish culture in cinema (of what little we know). Also, we respond to our very first mailbag!!!! Sláinte!Spotify - Apple - Google _____________________________ The Field is the crossroads of two obvious things working… more
A similarly Irish, darkly comic feud that turns stubbornness and isolation into tragedy.
Jim Sheridan’s other major early drama, with the same human intensity and emotional precision.
Another Sheridan film about pressure, injustice, and the crushing force of family and society.
A stage-rooted moral drama where communal fear and private obsession spiral into ruin.
A stately, dialogue-driven drama about conviction, power, and the cost of standing your ground.
An epic study of possession and obsession, with land and ambition at the center of the conflict.
A classic American land-and-survival drama about dispossession, dignity, and family endurance.
For another iconic Irish landscape where pride, tradition, and local power shape the drama.
A sweeping rural melodrama where a close-knit community becomes a pressure cooker.
A period drama about land, survival, and the brutal claims people make on territory.
Not rural, but it shares the same sense of a man’s empire and pride collapsing under pressure.
A meditative, morally serious film about conviction, land, and the cost of resistance.
land ownership, inheritance, family legacy, obsession, rural tragedy, masculinity, class conflict, community pressure
Irish drama, rural tragedy, family feud, land dispute, stage adaptation, tragic antihero, 1980s cinema, bleak tone, character study, period drama