The Banshees of Inisherin (2022)
In 1923, Irish islanders confront their inner demons. Get ye thither.
The Banshees of Inisherin (2022)
Colm (Brendan Gleeson, l.) abruptly ends his friendship Pádraic (Colin Farrell, r.)
Set in 1923 on Inisherin, a remote (fictional) island off the west coast of Ireland, this movie hooked me and fooled me with its stark simplicity and its deftly planted chuckles. The writer-director, Martin McDonagh, has a distinctive feel for Ireland and its folkways, and he crafts dialogue that brims with both melancholy and sly wit.
It’s a common man story of two lonely, anguished lifelong island dwellers who can’t admit how adrift their isolated lives have become.
Pádraic Súilleabháin (Colin Farrell) earns a modest living herding cows and selling the milk they produce. He shares a humble cabin with his loyal sister Siobahn (Kerry Condon). They lost their parents years ago and haven’t yet moved on to live full adult lives. They still chastely share the same bedroom.
Pádraic’s lifelong friend is the weary Colm Doherty (Brendan Gleeson), 50ish, who lives alone with an obedient, bright-eyed black-and-white collie for companionship.
Colm’s love of music consoles him. He can play the violin with a salty brio or a piercing sadness. He also composes plain tunes that float, beguilingly, into the smoke-filled air at the island’s only pub.
For years the friendship between the two has relied on banal “chatter” and what they’ve allowed to pass for understanding.
They regularly share talk over endless pints of ale at the pub, and are something of a local institution, seen drinking together by the townsfolk night after night (the imbibing can sometimes begin in the afternoon).
Suddenly, out of nowhere, Colm tells Pádraic he’s tired of their friendship, wants to end it, and forbids Pádraic to speak to him. The dumbfounded Pádraic pleads: “Why?”
Says a solemn Colm: “I just don’t like you no more.” A bewildered Pádraic feebly counters: “You liked me yesterday.”
Banshees’ earthbound yet slightly heightened story feels like a folktale rounded with a punch to the gut. It finds a lush, forlorn, troubling beauty in its rough Irish landscape.
But Colm won’t be dissuaded, and the slow dissolution of their bond begins. The islanders are agog, warily watching the breakup unfold, unable to make sense of it or put a halt to it.
It becomes clear that a deep despair has gripped Colm when, to keep Pádraic from “bothering” him any further, he vows to cut off a finger, if need be, more than one finger, every time his now former friend tries to talk to him.
As the town looks on in dismay, other islanders’ sadness and shame slowly rise to the surface.
Dominic (Barry Keoghan), a warm-hearted lad of limited intelligence is regularly beaten by his bullying father Peadar (Barry Lydon), who’s also the community’s only police officer. Father and son know more than they’re telling.
Siobahn, a voracious reader, is itching to find a job on the mainland and leave Inisherin and its hidebound ways behind. Will Pádraic cheer her on, or stand in her way?
Mrs. McCormick (Sheila Flitton), a white-haired pipe-smoking town elder, stalks the principals wearing a hooded black cloak, muttering doom. Is she a sort of banshee, a penetrating seer, with a witchy finger on the truth?
All this disquiet is set against bright, mocking blue skies, craggy mountain roads and a roiling green ocean stunningly shot by cinematographer Ben Davis. You can practically smell the briny air, taste the foam atop the tumblers of ale.
Surprisingly, Carter Burwell’s lovely, restrained score (including a remarkable female vocalist’s brooding, lyrical flights) is hardly Irish at all. In pre-production, McDonagh told Burwell, “I hate ‘deedle-dee,’ old world, Irish film music.”
So, Burwell instead took his inspiration from cartoons and fairy tales, and the result is a music that lilts and charms without relying on “Emerald Isle” hokum. It’s a haunting score that perfectly suits the story’s mix of humor and fraying ties.
Colm (Brendan Gleeson) inflicts indescribable pain on his lifelong friend Pádraic (Colin Farrell)
Farrell gives an intense, funny and moving performance as the seemingly hapless Pádraic, who takes a while to wrap his head around Colm’s sudden turn against him.
When the tension between the two escalates, Farrell eventually finds a sadness and even a rage that Pádraic has long buried under his “niceness”.
The community uses that word expansively, to mean something closer to “kindness”. The whole movie is asking, in terrified wonder, Can kindness be killed?
Gleeson has a face like a seamed mountainside, with deep lines and sorrowful eyes that take on a moony madness as Colm senses life’s meaning slipping away.
As stark, even gruesome, urges overtake Colm, we begin to see that his apparently solid friendship with Pádraic has kept him from peering within to look at what he can hardly bear to face.
Kerry Condon is perfect as the bracingly down to earth Siobahn, who defends Pádraic to the end but realizes that both she and her brother need to learn to stand on their own.
Keoghan is heartbreaking as the cruelly ill-used Dominic. The actor has a stunning moment when Dominic offers a fitful marriage proposal to Siobahn, knowing as the words haltingly fall from his mouth that, pitiably, he’s only pipe dreaming.
Banshees’ earthbound yet slightly heightened story feels like a folktale rounded with a punch to the gut. It finds a lush, forlorn, troubling beauty in its rough Irish landscape.
It’s a haunted, fable-like tale (the story is literally filled with animals) with the force and melancholy of a rural ballad. But also, a ballad’s longing, leaving us wanting more.
At least I felt that way, charmed and moved as I was by almost everything in this movie. It catches essences, asks us to believe in lingering, lifelong, barely spoken despair, and that’s a fine, even noble, undertaking.
But McDonagh, in trying to make his characters’ ordinariness bigger, does so by turning their humility weird, which is “dramatic” but doesn’t explain a whole lot.
I couldn’t help wondering: What’s broken this community’s — these two protagonists’ — hopes, quashed them, turned their yearning to sourness and sorrow?
But to be fair, that’s another story. McDonagh isn’t trying to account for the breadth and depth of Ireland’s glorious and painful history, or the human toll it’s taken. He’s got – what Irish writer doesn’t? – more questions than answers.
It’s to his credit that he’s written and directed here to let the Irish struggle forward with their immovable doubts still on their minds. “Solutions” remain elusive.
McDonagh honors Irish dilemmas by endowing them with an abiding rhythm, as though matters strange, eerie and odd are also age-old, timeless and tragic beyond anyone’s control. Wistfully, respectfully, I’ll drink to that.