The Banshees of Inisherin review: 2022’s funniest, darkest comedy

The Banshees of InisherinMartin McDonagh’s return to the familiar is this film. This plays as a spiritual sequel of his dark 2008 comedy-thriller In Bruges. That film, McDonagh’s feature debut, stars Colin Farrell and Brendan Gleeson as hitmen hiding out in a version of Brussels designed to feel like Catholic purgatory. Farrell, Gleeson and others also directed the film. BansheesA second whip-smart story, this time a wryly humorous tale driven by existential terror. This time around, they play much simpler men — a farmer and a musician, respectively — but they have the same anguish as their assassin counterparts, resulting in a film that maintains a spiritual vice grip over its audience, in spite of the charming setting.

McDonagh was eventually appointed writer-director. Three billboards in Ebbing Missouri() tries to anchor his abstract themes of mortality in the actual details of the story. This causes tension to diminish. The movie is so rich and emotionally complex that it is difficult to land the film.

Shot on the Irish islands of Inishmore and Achill — which stand in for the fictitious isle of Inisherin — the film feels both timeless and picturesque. Angelic choir notes score the opening scene, which follows Pádraic Súilleabháin (Farrell) on a routine stroll along Inisherin’s lush trails in the early 20th century. He’s checking in on his pal Colm Doherty (Gleeson) to invite him to the local pub for a pint, per their usual routine. But the quaint vision of paradise doesn’t last. Without spending even a moment on their backstory, McDonagh paints a vivid portrait of a friendship that has inexplicably crumbled, since Colm has decided — seemingly overnight — that he wants absolutely nothing to do with Pádraic, and he isn’t afraid to be blunt about it.

Pádraic, bewildered by Colm’s sudden rebuffs, can’t help but follow up and keep checking in with him, despite everyone’s advice to the contrary. Things take an unexpected turn here. To keep Pádraic away for good, Colm threatens to cut off one finger from his own fiddle hand every time Pádraic tries to speak with him.

Photo: Jonathan Hession/Searchlight Pictures

Every scene is staged with an eye toward emotional repression, and an ear toward rhythmic dialogue and its subtext about death and what lies beyond — the exact same driving forces that made In BrugesSo captivating. McDonagh keeps a keen focus on Farrell’s bemused attempts to put two and two together. As he struggles to find closure in a broken relationship, McDonagh’s journey of denial and realization is humbling. Each desperate attempt to find answers is just as much about discerning Colm’s motives as it is about Pádraic sussing out potential truths about himself. Who among us has not wondered what we’ve done so wrong that has made us so deserving of someone else’s ire?

But even once these cards seem to be laid on the table, Farrell’s construction of Pádraic continues to work in tandem with McDonagh’s winding text. Colm is a self-confessed artist who would prefer to spend his time creating music rather than idle conversation. However, it can take him a while to express his true motivations. In the meantime, Farrell’s performance reflects shades of the potential accusations and implications of Colm’s cold shoulder. Is Colm too much of an intellectual for Pádraic? Is Pádraic too naive? Was there some drunken insult or slight he doesn’t fully remember?

Whatever the case, Farrell’s quiet moments paint Pádraic as an easily amused man who maintains a touching friendship with his farm animals. But Farrell truly shines in the way he deepens even Pádraic’s most seemingly one-note traits. He layers each idiosyncrasy with a recognizable innocence as Pádraic begins to introspect. His conversational drive is polite and superficial, but it’s bolstered by a seeming inability to string together the right words, or connect the dots between two successive thoughts or emotions, even when they’re full and rich. He’s always searching, more than the average person should. Then again, despite Colm’s more put-together facade, he’s always searching too. (Frequently at confession at the local church, where he’s too dismissive of his gossipy priest to find real enlightenment or self-reflection.)

Photo: Jonathan Hession/Searchlight Pictures

Pádraic’s heartbreaking quest for answers is an uphill battle, especially when he begins to interrogate the movie’s rich tapestry of side characters — Pádraic’s educated sister Siobhán (a measured Kerry Condon), town simpleton Dominic (Killing a Sacred Deer’s Barry Keoghan, throwing his hat in the ring as a modern Peter Lorre), and other pub-goers, who ride a fine line between unconfrontational and nosy. All of them seem to get along with Colm just fine, which leaves Pádraic adrift, wondering whether he really is to blame for the fallout. It’s hard not to be convinced by Gleeson’s quietly menacing delivery, with harsh whispers that turn even desperate pleas for isolation into adversarial threats.

Both men hold back their emotions. But Farrell and Gleeson, who are both such gracious performers that their true-life friendship is evident in every frame. It makes the characters’ subdued affinity for each other feel all the more tragic once the friend-breakup is set in motion. This is especially evident during evenings at the pub, where the camera catches hesitant glances between them, as Colm plays music and Pádraic drinks away his sorrows. These glimpses give the film a romantic touch, and cinematographer Ben Davis captures it with dim lamplights and candlelight.

The seemingly eternal setting is actually very particular. Explosions on the mainland, off in the distance, reveal the movie’s historical backdrop: the Irish Civil War in the early 1920s. The actual violence never touches Inisherin’s shores, and there’s certainly a case to be made that the film’s tale of brother turning against brother is a metaphor for the conflict, albeit a flimsy one. However, the encroaching doom and gloom places the characters’ mortality front and center. Colm doesn’t come right out and say it, but his sudden desire to create and to be remembered, like his idol Mozart, feels directly informed by the looming specter of death. The banshee is an Irish folk tale that the film touches lightly on. And Colm is weighed down by a self-sabotaging streak that’s amusing but disturbing, given his threat to maim himself.

Photo: Jonathan Hession/Searchlight Pictures

Both men are forced to reflect on themselves, and on what they bring to those around them — one through larger political events, and the other through personal grievance. The more these reflections yield wildly opposing results, the more Pádraic and Colm’s encounters become a breeding ground for festering tensions about how to move through the modern world when all seems lost. Colm desires to be creative. Pádraic simply wants to exist. Perhaps neither one of the two options is more important in the face of loneliness or death.

McDonagh channeled all his philosophical musings via his stage sensibility and love for the rhythm and flow of words. He often captures these verbal and emotional rhythms by racking focus between characters, rather than cutting between them, as if the film’s visual aesthetic were its own enrapturing melody. The actual music swings in the opposite direction, with Carter Burwell adding a sense of mischief and mystery through strings plucked a little too aggressively, as if Colm is weaving the film’s aural fabric while trying to fend off Pádraic’s advances.

It uses humor to address its sorrowful content and emphasize the strangeness of its concept. The result is one of the darkest films in 2022. But McDonagh can’t quite find the right way to string all his heavy themes together once he enters its final act. As the story unfolds, the absurdist playwright in McDonagh comes rushing to the fore in a way it hasn’t in any of his films since In Bruges. BansheesHe retains the same dark humor that he used in his 2001 play The Lieutenant of Inishmore, which, while set in the early ’90s, also unfolds against the backdrop of sectarian Irish conflict, and similarly features an animal-loving protagonist named Pádraic. The problem, however, arises when McDonagh tries to graft the play’s Pádraic, and his violent emotional trajectory, onto his more restrained movie counterpart, when the two have little in common but their name.

McDonagh attempts to express his thoughts on the ethereal themes that are mortality and remembrance. The Banshees in InisherinIt ends up feeling like an attempt at grounding intangible spiritual problems in concrete reasoning and clear emotional pathways. This is mostly due to a coincidence at the last minute that seems largely unrelated from the characters. All of which makes the story more didactic and moralizing than the first two acts suggest it’s going to be.

Still, it’s surprisingly appropriate that the film should lose its way while trying to express the inexpressible, and trying to put words to emotions that Colm struggles to express. It’s hard to know how to talk about the lingering fear of how we’ll be remembered by the future once we’ve become the past. And until it strays off course, it remains a nuanced expression of this idea in the present, causing its characters to curdle and contort as they begin to believe they’re running out of time.

There is no good or bad person in the film. Practically every person in this film is either mean or irreverent. It is the constant quest for goodness, understanding or sense that makes this watch so fascinating. The watch is distinguished by its rich performance and striking tonal balance. It also features layered insights. The Banshees in Inisherin represents McDonagh at his optimum, creating a complex work that captures the strange spectrum of human emotions experienced at death’s front door.

The Banshees in InisherinIt will open in select theaters on Oct. 21. There will also be a nationwide roll-out in the coming weeks.