rated PG-13

To watch “The Wind That Shakes the Barley” is almost unbearable.

The very intimate physical violence depicted in the film’s first half hour is surpassed only by the psychic violence that carries the film to its finish. Through it all, the audience is forced to watch as the tide of history descends on a small corner of Ireland and shreds the lives of its inhabitants.

The film opens with a rough game of field hockey among boys, on a wild and verdant meadow cupped by sheltering hills. When it closes, everything has changed for these young men, their village and their country.

The setting is the Republican struggles of the 1920s, which first unite, then divide brother from brother and neighbor from neighbor, violating the sustaining principles of village life—mainly, twisting their sense of responsibility for one another into something unrecognizable. “I sure hope this Ireland we’re fighting for is worth it,” says Damien Donovan (Cillian Murphy), a medical student once headed for a position at a London hospital. Drawn into the fray, he’s forced to make the most dishonorable choices under the banner of a just cause.

The story is sympathetically told from Damien’s point of view. His fate is twined to the cause of nationalism after he witnesses the infamous Black and Tans take actions too numerous and brutal to ignore.     In joining the fight, he becomes one of thousands of men and women too ordinary for the history books to mention, yet whose resistance cost them their souls, if not their lives. He and his disenfranchised countrymen will prevail—even if it takes a century—but they misjudge much along the way, including the promise of a truce that, as Damien says, “does not express the will of the people but the fear of the people,” and ultimately pits the resistance fighters against each other.

Damien’s cause and courage are heroic, but the film does not treat him like a hero. It treats him like an everyman caught up in a machine crafted and operated by distant  heads of state, industry and the church. Into this war that no one can win, he first follows his fearless, charismatic older brother Teddy Donovan (Padraic Delaney), who recruits him into the cause, then follows his own conscience with childhood friend Sinead (Orla Fitzgerald), who becomes his sweetheart and political partner.

Director Ken Loach, with a background in theater and abiding faith in socialist realism, never lets us get too close to these characters. There’s very little back story, and very little dialogue related to anything in their lives but the fight. They become actors on a stage, their lives like lines of poetry, and it’s in this manner that their private emotions are revealed. Vivid and heartbreaking, irrepressible and fragile, they are simply country boys, learning to crawl through the tall grass on their bellies, fighting in overcoats and caps, using homespun cloth masks over nose and mouth and brandishing the most rudimentary weapons to take on an empire. They leave behind loved ones, youth and their future for what appears to be a hopeless cause—a guerilla war, fought town to town against an oppressor too large to fathom with tanks, men and weaponry at its disposal to quash any spark of insurgency in colonial territories across the globe. If seen, the fighters will be caught, warns a guerilla fighter leading their training, and “If they catch you, they’ll kill you,” he says.

Each of these fighters—named or unnamed—could be the viewer’s brother, or given the era, a grandfather who died at age 18, never even knowing his own children and grandchildren to come. Helplessly watching them meet their fate, we come to care deeply for them, and all those like them around the world forced into wars not of their making.