Although perhaps “butchered” by the re-cut, there is enough in the film as it exists to suggest its complexly grim melancholia. It holds that the needless death of innocents is the point where revolution segues into terrorism: a distinction that Rourke cannot bear to bridge and indeed feels has thus damned him. Despite his desire to leave, he is waiting for death in what amounts to a world of the dead. The iconography of decay and dying saturates this film, with Bates also a mortician who prefers to be alone with the corpses he lovingly prepares and beautifies before burial. As Rourke realizes that he may have the responsibility to protect Hoskins and Davis from Bates, so too he begins to realize that this may offer his only chance at redemption – to not waste the role he has been given in protecting the fates of others. Bates would seek to wrench control of this fate and between these men the film becomes an analysis of a fallen humanity, aware of its damnation yet having a responsibility for the lives of others not yet damned. What value is the life so lived in damnation thus becomes a central theme as the film slowly turns to the prospect of the need for forgiveness to sustain hope and even purpose. In that respect the film also explores Hoskins’ dilemma: the Catholic ideal of “absolution” facing something of a moral reckoning as one wonders what are the limits to forgiveness in the light of monstrous human frailty?
The key to the film, however, is its forceful evocation of Rourke’s humane dilemma, his sullen but still reluctant belief that he has fallen from grace. With this, the film becomes a stunning depiction of tortured humanity, of men faced with the realization that they may be irredeemable after all and that absolution may be an escapist and illusory forgiveness – a religion only valid in desperation. Correspondingly, the three leading men are all contrasted in terms of their approach to religious faith: Bates is coldly demonic, immersing himself in the world of the dead and thinking nothing of killing, whilst Hoskins clings to a faith in humanity’s potential to be saved and Rourke hovers in the middle. Hoskins is the one person willing to forgive Rourke and it is ironic that Rourke cannot understand this, so consumed is he by self-loathing and despair. Hoskins says tellingly that man cannot live without forgiveness; a conclusion to the film’s prolonged examination of life lived in a harrowing state of encroaching damnation. A Prayer for the Dying is less a terrorist thriller of the IRA than a ponderous vision of humanity fallen to the point where it has begun to lose sight of itself and its last vestiges cry out for salvation: Bates is totally irredeemable, whilst Rourke is a man of conscience aware of his own probable fate but silently yearning for absolution. In this world, religious absolution is the only prospect left the doomed. read more