{"product_id":"middletown","title":"Middletown","description":"Brian Kirk's gothic thriller Middletown excoriates the actions and attitudes of the Irish Catholic clergy by honing in on one psychotically deranged fire-and-brimstone preacher. Matthew MacFadyen is Gabriel Hunter, a priest fresh from missions work in Africa. After 15 years of service in the field, Gabriel returns to his hometown in Ireland to occupy the now-vacant pulpit. Once there, he re-encounters three members of his working-class brood: his father, Bill Hunter (Gerard McSorley); his younger brother, the service station attendant Jim (Daniel Mays); and Jim's expectant wife Caroline (Eva Birthistle), who runs the local speakeasy. The family welcomes Gabriel home, but from the first moments of his arrival, he projects a violent, hair-trigger temper; relentless, psychopathic bursts of unchecked anger; and a sadistic obsession with inflicting pain and cruelty on everything and everyone around him -- from squelching live mice beneath his heels to strangling the neck of a chicken that he seizes during a cockfight. From the pulpit, Gabriel uses sermons to relentlessly damn the members of his congregation for their sins, including all activity at the local pub, which he perceives as a den of iniquity. When Gabriel hears Caroline's refusal to have her child baptized, the statement pushes him completely over the edge and triggers a string of increasingly violent acts that will bring the entire community to its knees -- and threaten the lives and safety of Bill, Jim, Caroline, and the newborn baby. Daragh Carville authored the script.","brand":"MovieMars","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":44372989346079,"sku":"066805308550","price":13.95,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0679\/7833\/0399\/products\/e005efaefa50f3bb675ed22509624687.jpg?v=1680855347","url":"https:\/\/www.moviemars.com\/products\/middletown","provider":"MovieMars","version":"1.0","type":"link"}