The Banshees of Inisherin
Photo: Searchlight Pictures

The Banshees of Inisherin Review: A Tragicomic Look at Loneliness

Martin McDonagh’s film is a mordantly funny dark fable about men’s inability to work together for the betterment of society.

Martin McDonagh’s The Banshees of Inisherin begins with a simple conflict that gloriously unravels in ways both expected and novel. In 1923, two friends, Pádraic (Colin Farrell) and Colm (Brendan Gleeson), who reside on the titular fictional island off the coast of Ireland meet up every afternoon to go to the local pub. But on the particular day that the film opens, Pádraic arrives at his friend’s home to find Colm ignoring his knocks at the door. When Colm finally appears at the pub a little later, he refuses to sit by or even acknowledge Pádraic. Once a perplexed Pádraic prods him about his sudden shift in behavior, Colm finally responds, directly and without emotion, “I just don’t like you anymore.”

Right out of the gate, McDonagh milks this odd situation for maximum drollness, as Pádraic and the better part of Inisherin’s confined population strain to figure out why Colm has so abruptly cut off his lifelong friend. Upon further pushing, Colm admits that he finds Pádraic dull, something that he apparently no longer has time for, sparking a side-splitting conversation about the relative value of the banter that previously sustained their friendship. Colm calls it “aimless talking” while Pádraic vehemently counters with “good, normal talking.”

Later in The Banshees of Inisherin, when Colm relays all of this seemingly petty drama to Pádraic’s sister, Siobhan (Kerry Condon), she retorts, “But he’s always been dull.” Colm, however, is in the throes of an existential crisis, dead set on making the most of his remaining time on Earth by focusing on composing music. But as he continues to engage with the rest of the townsfolk, his snubbing of Pádraic seems confoundingly mean-spirited.

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Farrell and Gleeson effortlessly rekindle their chemistry from McDonagh’s feature-length directorial debut, In Bruges, with Colm’s stern solemnity shutting down Pádraic’s puppy-dog enthusiasm every step of the way. Farrell, in particular, masterfully balances a constantly fluctuating array of emotions throughout, with Pádraic’s naturally jovial nature butting up against the confusion, anger, and dejection that slowly overwhelm him. Yet his optimism still tends to win out and, determining that Colm must just be momentarily depressed, Pádraic continues to hysterically follow his friend around the island and start benign conversations as if nothing’s wrong, despite Colm’s increasingly urgent demands to be left alone.

As is McDonagh’s specialty, violence and absurdity eventually commingle, with Colm finally giving Pádraic an ultimatum that, for the viewer, both stuns and amuses. Colm vows to begin cutting one of his own fingers off each time Pádraic henceforth engages with him, a pledge that nobody on the island takes seriously at first. But once the ultimatum is gruesomely realized, The Banshees of Inisherin steadily ups the ante into the realm of the macabre, with Colm and Pádraic allowing themselves to get caught up in a whirl of escalating savagery.

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And yet, as dark as things get, the film never abandons its sly sense of humor. At his wit’s end from trying and failing to politely win back Colm’s favor, Pádraic drunkenly confronts Colm at the pub one night to assert how he really feels about his friend’s newfound meanness. Upon finding out later that Colm respected his candor (“I think I might actually want to be friends with him again,” Colm dryly states after Pádraic storms out), Pádraic decides to try this approach again, only sober, leading to a riotous display of blundering aggression as he bursts into Colm’s house to awkwardly berate him. Meanwhile, the rest of the townsfolk, including Dominic (Barry Keoghan), the gawky son of the local police chief, act as a chipper peanut gallery for these fraught events. Even the animals on Inisherin are attuned to the turmoil, with both Pádraic’s beloved donkey and Colm’s dog attempting to temper the feud between their masters.

McDonagh expertly exposes how Pádraic and Colm’s wounded egos result in juvenile show of masculine assertiveness that ends up dragging everyone around them into its orbit. Through all of this, Siobhan is the voice of reason, constantly having to play the scolding mother to these two overgrown children. But the film wisely doesn’t situate Siobhan as just a stereotypical female caregiver, ensuring that her own hopes and dreams take a prominent narrative position.

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Living in a ramshackle house with her brother, Siobhan feels just as existentially stuck on Inisherin as her male compatriots, yet she’s the only one to actually do something productive about it, attempting to secure a job offer on the mainland and move on to the next phase of her life. Therefore, she’s the only one in The Banshees of Inisherin who’s adequately suited to truly call out Colm and Pádraic’s blustery nonsense. When Colm tells her at one point that he just can’t stand how boring Pádraic is, she sharply exclaims, “All of you men are boring!”

Colm and Pádraic, however, are doomed to see this conflict through to the bitter end, as McDonagh’s allegorical ambitions become more apparent the longer it stretches on. With the tumult of the Irish Civil War constantly raging across the sea, McDonagh positions Inisherin as its own spellbinding microcosm of senseless, self-serving conflict, applicable to anywhere and anytime. More evident is the insertion of Mrs. McCormick (Sheila Flitton), an elderly and foreboding old woman who wanders around the island like a spectre, Inisherin’s own resident banshee. These inclusions may seem on the nose, but in the end, McDonagh lyrically whips them all into a mordantly funny dark fable about men’s innate inability to work together for the betterment of society at large. “The banshees of Inisherin no longer need to scream portents,” Colm succinctly puts it at one point, “they just sit back and observe.”

Score: 
 Cast: Colin Farrell, Brendan Gleeson, Kerry Condon, Barry Keoghan, Pat Shortt, Gary Lydon, David Pearse, Sheila Flitton  Director: Martin McDonagh  Screenwriter: Martin McDonagh  Distributor: Searchlight Pictures  Running Time: 114 min  Rating: R  Year: 2022  Buy: Video

Mark Hanson

Mark Hanson is a film writer and curator from Toronto, Canada, and the product manager at Bay Street Video, one of North America's last remaining video stores.

3 Comments

  1. So the point of the film is that “men can’t work together” because of… toxic masculinity? May I humbly object on two grounds:
    1. Maybe writing an essay would be more effective about this topic since cinema, art, should be about beauty, shouldn’t it?
    2. Appolo program, Voyager probe, eradication of plagues and major diseases here are simple counter-arguments in the socratic sense to that very simplistic argument of yours.
    with kind regards

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