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Early in “The Shadow of Violence,” a beefy Irish thug named Douglas Armstrong (“Arm” to everybody) defends his day job of beating people up for local gangsters by saying, “They say violence is done by hateful men — but sometimes, it’s just the way a fella makes sense of this world.”

The film uses lines like that in an attempt to pull off a tricky feat. It wants us to feel sympathy for Arm as a guy just trying to make sense of the world, but it doesn’t do it the easy way; first we see him calmly beat an old man to a pulp for something the guy might not have even done, and then we learn he has a heart of gold.

First-time feature director Nick Rowland stacks the deck against his lead character by doing it that way, but he’s not interested in making a typical movie about gangsters.

“I’m told I was a violent child,” Douglas Armstrong, better known as “Arm,” says in the opening voiceover of “The Shadow of Violence.” Played by Cosmo Jarvis, he’s a visibly haunted former boxer with a tragic backstory that’s led him to a new life of crime. “Don’t go thinking all violence is the way of hateful men. Sometimes it’s just the way a fellow makes sense of this world,” he says. But inside Arm there’s an ooey-gooey center of sweetness that is slowly unraveled over the course of this lean, mean, and brutal Irish crime fable from director Nick Rowland, a first-time feature filmmaker making his elegant debut after a career in TV and short films.

. Not to mention a powerful vehicle for its two leads, Jarvis and Barry Keoghan.

“The Shadow of Violence” was previously titled “Calm with Horses,” in reference to Arm’s equine-whispering abilities,...