‘THE BANSHEES OF INISHERIN’ Examines the Tragic Hilarity of a Country at War With Itself

A Very Civil War

The year is 1923. In Inisherin, a small, remote island off the east coast of Ireland, the days are filled with an almost apocalyptic ennui. From across the bitter cold of the Atlantic, the report of gunfire and cannons signal the ongoing Irish Civil War. Ireland’s Civil War came on the heels of their War of Independence from Great Britain. And claimed even more lives. It pit brothers and friends against one another, forcing allies who had fought alongside each other just the year prior against England at each other’s throats. The war was deeply personal and subsequently bitter and bloody.

On Inisherin, at 2 PM each day, Pádraic (Colin Farrell) saunters off to the only local pub to drain pints with his best friend Colm (Brendan Gleeson), a long standing tradition. Trouble is, Colm no longer wants to be friends with Pádraic. His reasons are vague but his pronouncement is definitive, “You didn’t do anything. I just don’t like you no more.” After a lifetime of friendship, Colm suddenly finds Pádraic dull, and determines to devote their time wasted chatting to his fiddle music instead. The shift in their relationship is abrupt and without cause and occurs before the viewer has a sense for this island, its people, and their relationships. Nevertheless, Colm is so intent on their not being friends anymore that he’s threatened to mutilate himself, by cutting off a finger each time that the former friend so much as talks to him. A touch extreme, no doubt.

As should be the case, Pádraic is mystified by this sudden reversal in their relationship. He’s left to determine if Colm’s sea change is a bad April Fool’s joke, a ploy to make him stand up for himself more, or a symptom of his aged musician friend’s advancing depression. Whilst the duo of once-compatriots turn on one another overnight, one is left to dwell on the Civil War raging on the other side of the ocean.

Irish auteur Martin McDonagh’s (In Bruges, Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri) film is equally a grim dark comedy and a commentary on the soul-rendering horror of civil war. To be turned against your brethren – be they cousins, friends, uncles and aunts, distant brothers, fathers, mothers, neighbors, or peers – by politic differences is to cleave off a part of yourself. Colm’s commitment to sever his fingers at something so small as a conversation is a satirical spin on the bitter tragedy of political division: the metaphysical made viscerally physical. It’s black humor at its most mystifying and blunt.

McDonagh’s picture is at once minimalist and dense, haunted by characters that suggest an almost mythic quality. Filling out the margins, Barry Keoghan plays the town dunce and son to its violent police officer, Dominic; Kerry Condon is Pádraic’s warm and book-smart sister Siobhan, one of the island’s only inhabitants that seems bigger than the island on which she is kept; and Sheila Flitton appears as the ghoulish neighbor Mrs. McCormick – herself an otherworldly specter of bad fortune. Each character feels richly drawn and purposeful, though that purpose can be at an arm’s length at times, far enough away to require the microscope of repeat viewings. So too can the Galway accents prove a bit marbly for those lacking an ear for Irish lingo (myself included.)

Down to the name of the movie, The Banshees of Inisherin feels like an adaptation of some unwritten Shakespearean tragedy or Homerian epic. It’s a film that revels in its own riddles and demands multiple screenings to puzzle out what everything means. Its singular commitment to certain thematic realities undoubtedly make it a tough sell for mainstream audiences, many of whom will likely shake off McDonagh’s work as strange and possibly pretentious – characteristics that may well apply – but it also makes it an unforgettable curio.

Inisherin’s moodiness and overcast sense of dread is infectious – it cast a pall on this viewer as it has many who have seen it. I’ve had trouble getting it out of my head since. When you factor in the addition of one of Farrell’s most eyebrow-heavy performances, Ben Davis’ ethereal cinematography (which uses natural light in all sorts of wonderful ways), a stable full of indoor farm animals (including an adorable miniature donkey that continues the director’s brazen and bizarre obsession with dwarves), and McDonagh’s unhurried, deliberate direction and darkly comic sense of humor, the film proves itself to be a kind of sweeping, bewildering singularity. Oddly entrancing and yet purposefully uncanny; a weird wonder in the mold of Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal. Behold its gonzo glory.

CONCLUSION: ‘The Banshees of Inisherin’ is a striking dark comedy brimming with thematic depth, boasting a strong cast and sizable ideas but unlikely to click with mainstream audiences. McDonagh’s strange little creation is quite unlike anything else – for better and for worse. Mostly better.