The film follows Fergus (Rea), a member of the IRA, who has a brief but meaningful encounter with a British soldier, Jody (Whitaker), who is being held prisoner by the group.
At a rural Northern Irish fairground, a Provisional IRA volunteer named Fergus and a unit of other IRA members, led by Peter Maguire, kidnap a Black British soldier named Jody after a female member of their unit, Jude, lures Jody to a secluded area by promising sex.
The unit intends to hold Jody until an imprisoned IRA member is released, and if their demands are not met within three days, he will be executed.
Around the same time, Jude reappears and coerces Fergus into helping with an assassination plot against a British judge, using the threat of harm to Dil to ensure his cooperation.
Neil Jordan first drafted the screenplay in the mid-1980s under the title The Soldier's Wife, but shelved the project after a similar film was released.
Jordan sought to begin production of the film in the early 1990s, but found it difficult to secure financing,[4] as the script's controversial themes and his recent string of box office flops discouraged potential investors.
Several funding offers from the United States fell through because the funders wanted Jordan to cast a woman to play the role of Dil, believing that it would be impossible to find an androgynous male actor who could pass as female.
The producers constantly searched for small amounts of money to keep the production going, and the unreliable pay left crew members disgruntled.
Costume designer Sandy Powell had an extremely small budget to work with and ended up having to lend Davidson some of her own clothes to wear in the film, as the two happened to be the same size.
The opening sequence was shot in Laytown, County Meath, Ireland, and the rest in London and Burnham Beeches, Buckinghamshire, England.
[9] The film was shown at festivals in Italy, the United States and Canada in September, and originally released in Ireland and the UK in October 1992, where it failed at the box office.
Director Neil Jordan, in later interviews, attributed this failure to the film's heavily political undertone, particularly its sympathetic portrayal of an IRA fighter.
A memorable advertising campaign generated intense public curiosity by asking audiences not to reveal the film's "secret" regarding Dil's gender identity.
The consensus states, "The Crying Game is famous for its shocking twist, but this thoughtful, haunting mystery grips the viewer from start to finish.
Theorist and author Jack Halberstam argued that the viewer's placement in Fergus's point of view regarding Dil being a transsexual reinforces societal norms rather than challenging them.
He was critical of The Crying Game stating that the film "copped out" and that "the Stephen Rea character should have killed the black soldier" as it "would have made the movie so much more powerful because his guilt would have been so much greater".