Mark Reviews Movies: THE BANSHEES OF INISHERIN

The Banshees of Inisherin, Searchlight Pictures

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Review by Mark Dujsik | October 20, 2022

Writer/director Martin McDonagh's The Banshees of Inisherin is many things—a comedy about two friends who have a falling out, a fable about life on a small island, an allegory about the Troubles of Ireland. At its core, though, this is a film about the persistence and all-encompassing nature of loneliness. It's equally funny and heartbreaking, because it is both absurdly and achingly honest.

The setup is a thing of simple ingenuity and ingenious simplicity. On the fictional island of Inisherin in 1923, Pádraic (Colin Farrell) walks from his home, down the road, and toward the sea, where his constant best friend of who-knows-how-many years lives. The clock in the cottage belonging to Colm (Brendan Gleeson) chimes twice as Pádraic arrives, as it surely has done countless times when the pair's regular appointment arrives.

They're meant to go up to the local pub for some beer and plenty of chatting about who-cares-what, but this time, Colm doesn't answer when Pádraic comes calling. His friend is in the house, to be sure, but staring through the window and tapping on the glass and calling his buddy's name some more, Pádraic receives no answer. Colm just sits, smoking a cigarette and staring at nothing in particular.

In a film filled with eccentric characters but wholly believable performances, Farrell's stands out, not only as the main figure, but also one whose work communicates engrained behavior, brought about from the depths of both kindness and melancholy within him. He possesses an absence of personality that makes him into, well, quite the personality among his peers. We know so much about this friendship and the immediate oddity of Colm seeming to ignore Pádraic, simply from the unflinching smile that fills his face on that walk toward the cottage, as well as the confounded but calm way Pádraic reacts to Colm's stillness and witnessing his friend's solo venture to the pub.

More to the point, there's the shocked disbelief when Colm tells it to Pádraic straight. He doesn't want to be Pádraic's friend anymore.

From that straightforward but enigmatically loaded and personally earth-shattering declaration, McDonagh's screenplay opens up to reveal an entire, isolated world of oddities, conflict, past pains, present despair, and futures that seem as set as the stone of the walls that litter the hills of this island. McDonagh opens the film with an aerial shot of the landscape, which is repeatedly breathtaking as a backdrop to the intimate drama and character-focused comedy of this story (Ben Davis' cinematography never loses sight of the faces or the feeling of these solitary, pained figures amidst the vast beauty and emptiness of their home). It's only later, as the filmmaker's broader concerns about the nature and inevitability of conflict come to the surface, that those vast mazes of rock bring to mind literal divides as ancient as those structures.

That, though, is enough of that for the moment. While the film does examine universal ideas and brings some sense of myth to them, it is primarily a comedy about the lengths to which two men will go to accomplish very opposing goals. Pádraic simply wants his erstwhile friend to like him, as Colm did until recently, again.

Colm just wants some quiet and, mostly, a life that's absent of the "dull" Pádraic, with his meaningless talk about who-cares-what, because Colm no longer cares for that now. The character may not be as constant, talkative, or emotive a presence in this story as Pádraic is, but the idea of Colm persists and picks away at us, as it does with Pádraic, who cannot understand how someone could change so suddenly or, perhaps a worse scenario, so easily hide their disdain for so long.

Gleeson's performance rests perfectly on the line between casually apathetic and downright cold, because there is much more to Colm than simple meanness or cruelty. The man is suffering from a kind of existential crisis—desperate to make something of the time he has left, composing music that he hopes will last, without wasting any of it. There's more to his despair than even that, though, if the contradictory nature of an ultimatum he makes to Pádraic is any indication.

Pádraic, obviously, takes the sudden dismissal and inherent insult quite personally and keeps trying to determine the reason for, as well as a solution to, Colm's decision. The humor expands from this impasse, through clever and natural dialogue that, since both characters say what they really mean and neither one can believe the other, creates a kind of game of its own. Pádraic's insistence and Colm's steadfastness constantly escalate the bare bones of the plot. Matters become so gruesomely ridiculous and genuinely antagonistic that it's almost impossible to imagine such dreadful circumstances arising from something so fundamentally simple and simply painful (As a general parable and/or direct allegory of larger conflicts, such as one the visible on the mainland from the island, the story becomes pointedly sobering and discouraging).

It's not all misery, though. First of all, the bickering and initial acceleration of the disagreement between the two men is quite funny. Second, McDonagh ensures that this story features some flickers of hope, even if they exist among unlikely people and are ultimately extinguished in order to heighten the central point.

Chief among those glimmers is Pádraic's sister Siobhan. She's played by Kerry Condon in a performance that radiates with gentle warmth but is also capable of cutting to the core of how irrational all of this is (She scolds Colm for calling her brother "dull," if only because all of the petty grudges of the people in this place are intrinsically dull from her perspective). In the hierarchy of Pádraic's affections, Siobhan is only just above his pet donkey, which follows him around like a puppy and which he adores as much as Colm loves his actual dog.

Another source of some hope—a most unlikely one—exists in the character of Dominic (Barry Keoghan), who begins as a weird creep (He's quite taken with a hooked pole he discovers, for reasons that much later suggest some supernatural idea of destiny, and is obsessed with women). After we learn that his cop father (played by Gary Lydon) is an abuser, he quickly looks as wounded a soul as the rest of our main characters. A seemingly awkward scene by a lake between the sister and the outcast reveals the best these characters can offer, although whether that's enough for either in such a lonely place is a different story.

All of these characters serve as reminders that everything and everyone Pádraic could need is in front of him. In The Banshees of Inisherin, though, doom comes not from some supernatural force screaming in the night. It arrives in the quiet, from feeling ignored or forgotten, and, as Pádraic might put it, in simply being "not nice" when the other option is right there.

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