The Butcher Boy is perhaps the finest film to have come out of Ireland. Although it marks a clear break with the more banal canons of realism, it is nonetheless the most realistic of Irish films. It engages with the society and culture of modern Ireland with a wit and ferocity that denies the viewer any easy moral position. Cinema is often thought of as a purely visual art, but this film is adapted from a novel by a filmmaker who is himself a writer of prose fiction. In this study, Colin McCabe examines the process by which fiction becomes film, and writing becomes image.