The playwright-turned-filmmaker Martin McDonagh has always been adept at molding the misery and mirth of life into melancholic works of cinematic reflection. It began with his 2004 silly yet somber short film Six Shooter, about a man taking a train home after a loss. McDonagh expanded many of these elements into a feature with the magnificent In Bruges in 2008, which accompanied two hitmen taking a trip where they grappled with their respective lives and their proximity to death. Then there was 2012's Seven Psychopaths, where he created his most sly and explosive story, centered on a dognapped Shih Tzu of all things. This was followed by 2017's Oscar-winning Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, about a mother seeking justice in a cruel world, which was fantastic in isolated moments though incomplete in others.
Through all of these films, even when they didn't fully connect, McDonagh proved to be a storyteller whose ability to thread the needle between the tragedy and comedy of life was unparalleled. With The Banshees of Inisherin, McDonagh has crafted a work that manages to be his most focused while also soaring as his most emotionally expansive. It is not just his best film to date, but one of the best of the year.
Central to this is the reunion of the In Bruges duo of Colin Farrell and Brendan Gleeson, who are each more understated here, though give similarly multifaceted performances. Farrell is Pádraic, a lonely man who spends most of his days either with his animals or at the sole pub on the gorgeous yet isolated fictional Irish isle of Inisherin. Gleeson is his friend Colm, a musician who hungers for a greater purpose in both his art and life. Set against the backdrop of the Irish Civil War in 1923, the film explores what happens when Colm decides to cut Pádraic out of his life. The reasons he provides for this are initially vague, leaving Pádraic humorously confused and then increasingly frustrated with his longtime friend. When Colm warns him that any attempts to even speak to him will result in him harming himself by cutting off his own fingers, the escalation that takes hold of the small world they inhabit foretells a more profound sense of sadness. They don't always have the words for it, but we come to realize that underneath all the laughs is a truer observation of how each man is teetering on the edge of becoming lost.
Don't be mistaken, the film is uproariously funny in how it elicits humor from the simplest of places. Pádraic's sister Siobhan, played by a pitch-perfect Kerry Condon of Better Call Saul and the aforementioned Three Billboards, delivers one such moment when she informs Colm that "you're all feckin' boring" as an expression of her exasperation. Both she and the troubled local lad Dominic (played by The Killing of a Sacred Deer's Barry Keoghan, who steals one key scene alongside Condon) inhabit diverging storylines that are not the main focus but are just as thematically rich. All of these characters are like people you run into on the street though, rather than forget them, you come to know each so deeply that you love them completely, rough edges and all. Their pain becomes yours as well.
The civil war happening across the way, referenced in passing conversations by characters as they go about their days with distant explosions echoing, is absolutely integral to understanding this tragicomedy. McDonagh, while rather overt in making clear the split is a stand-in for the fighting happening right next door, brings it to life with such well-realized characters that it plays as a poetic parable. That Pádraic and Colm were closer than just about anyone makes it all the more painful to see their sudden schism. Even if the laughs may fade, the humor goes hand in bloody hand with the tragedy unfolding before them. A life of sadness, internal and external, is depressingly, existentially funny. As the film looks on the characters from above, struggling alone to make sense of it all, it arrives at a truth at which one can only laugh at in order not to cry. ♦
The Banshees of Inisherin
