There’s nothing for you on Inisherin. Nothing but more bleakness and grudges and loneliness and spite and the slow passing of time until death. And sure you can do that anywhere.
The premise of this movie is pretty simple when you get right down to it. Two men have been friends for years when, quite suddenly, literally overnight, one of them decides that he doesn’t want to be friends anymore. But out of this incredibly simple set-up, writer-director McDonagh and his absurdly brilliant ensemble create a maelstrom of emotional toxicity, pitch-black comedy and painful tragedy. I mean, I’m not saying I was surprised exactly; it is Martin McDonagh after all. But I think he has crafted something really, really special here, even by his own high standards.
The script and the cast are really just working together on such a perfect level here. The cast is A-level all the way around. Brendan Gleeson is the friend who decides to end the friendship and I think his part is probably the most difficult; his motivations are often very opaque and as the film progresses, he falls farther and farther into irrationality. “How is the despair?” a priest asks him in one of the opening scenes of the film; “A bit better,” he says. But as the film goes along, we come to understand that he’s a deeply sick and disturbed man. The tragedy is that, by the time he gains enough perspective to realize that his impulses are driving him in all the wrong directions, he’s too far in and the situation is out of control. Colin Farrell is quite possibly career best as the friend who can’t understand why he’s suddenly been cut off by his “best friend.” The character is not so bright, really quite dense in some ways, but Farrell finds a way into that density and lets all of the emotions spool out of it; when Padraic is angry, he isn’t just angry – he’s stupidly angry and that’s why his anger is so frightening. While Gleeson’s character is always thinking, he’s thinking with a mind that’s sick; Farrell’s character usually isn’t really thinking at all. When Padraic says at one point that he’s a “thinker,” one of the other characters says that he really isn’t: “You’re more of a . . . you’re more one of life’s good guys,” he says. Oof.
Meanwhile, even with Gleeson and Farrell doing brilliant work, Kerry Condon, as Padraic’s long-suffering, sharp-tongued sister, steals every scene she’s in. She’s a woman caught once again in a war waged between men and she’s cursed to be the smartest one in the room. Barry Keoghan rounds out the leading quartet to perfection as the “dim one” on the island, Dominic. To say that it’s a typical Barry Keoghan performance is to undersell it; he’s just realiably excellent and he’s above average here. He’s the character given many of the funniest lines of the film and his delivery is absolutely delightful; that many of his funniest lines are also deeply sad isn’t lost on the viewer or on Dominic himself. “A stick with a hook,” he says at one point, “What would you use it for, I wonder? To hook things that are the length of a stick away?” He turns out to be right about that.
The film as a whole kind of walks that absurdist tightrope. I don’t know that it’s a film that should really be called a “comedy,” but it’s also the funniest movie I’ve seen in years. I laughed out loud more often and harder than at any movie I’ve seen in the theater since Toni Erdmann. There’s a confessional scene here that is a masterpiece of comedic timing; I have to give a shout-out to David Pearse as the priest who really knocks it out of the park in his two or three scenes. Pat Shortt & Jon Kenny are also fantatic in supporting roles.
And, stepping away from the comedy element to namecheck a few folks, I also have to give props to Carter Burwell’s beautiful score and the lovely cinematography by Ben Davis. Those two elements in particular provide a real sense of beauty that offsets the existential bleakness of the piece; and, look, I come not to bury Women Talking, but to praise The Banshees of Inisherin, but, well, listen, Banshees is a case study in how you can maintain beauty in your visuals without sacrificing an ounce of the story’s underlying darkness. You can make an emotionally ugly movie without subjecting your audience to ugly visuals; that’s all I’m saying.
Banshees is, really, one of the saddest movies of the year, an exploration of despair, self-mutilation, anger, violence and the way situations can spiral out of control. It’s a meditation on cycles of violence and, while I’m sure I’m missing a lot of nuanced stuff that speaks directly to things like the Irish Civil War, those cycles plague us everywhere and McDonagh has crafted a deeply moving picture of people talking past each other. Colm’s concerned with art; Padraic seems obsessed with “niceness.” As they discover, however, there’s precious little of either to be found on Inisherin. 4 stars.
tl;dr – deeply sad, sharply funny, brilliantly written and acted, this nasty slice of Irish cinema explores the cycles of self-destruction in friendship, family, masculinity, despair, anger and violence. 4 stars.