Any reference to Calvary holds a quasi-exotic and mystical status that demands a certain reverence. So it is that John Michael McDonagh sets the tone for his cinematic confessional: a bleakly acerbic, comic and gratingly self-referential portrayal of a contemporary rural Irish community and a Catholic church in decline.

Shrouded in the darkness of the confession box, Father James (Brendan Gleeson) hears from a voice beyond the grille that he is to be killed the following Sunday: one of his parishioners, sexually abused by a priest as a child, has chosen him to atone for the sins of the hypocritical and harmful Church.

As the rest of Calvary hammers home, the question is whether the possibility of expiation or redemption exists in today’s society. The irony – in a film which adopts the Christian narrative as its guiding force – seems to be that there is not. In the week that follows, we encounter various characters from James’ flock: the domestically abusive Jack (Chris O’Dowd), his vauntingly adulterous wife (Orla O’Rourke), the offensively rich retired financier (Dylan Moran) or the atheist doctor (Aiden Gillen). They are the multitude that mocks our messiah who, despite flaws of his own, is the film’s moral compass.

As each day passes, Father James helter-skelters willingly – yet more and more obviously in vain – towards his fate with eschatological bathos and the futile dignity of a sacrificial lamb.

Calvary is clearly intended as a postmodern passion play, a probing of and a musing on faith, doubt, death and the legacy of the Church’s abuse, with a pinch of commentary on Ireland’s economic situation thrown in for good measure. The film self-knowingly deflates its exalted aspirations with gallows humour and satire in an attempt at self-deprecation, but the whole premise awkwardly screams ‘I’m meta and I know it’.

Gleeson’s mesmerising screen presence just about holds everything together, but the film fails to achieve the messianic greatness to which it aspires.