The Banshees of Inisherin

dir: Martin McDonagh

2022

That was all so very Irish.

There’s a bunch of people saying feck and fecking all the time. They all speak with the most Oirish of Oirish brogues. They all pronounce their names and each other’s such that you can hear the Irish Gaelic pronunciation. So it’s not “Patrick Sullivan”, it’s “Pádraic Súilleabháin”.

And it’s not “Colm”, it’s “Colm”. See the difference?

Colm (Brendan Gleeson) and Padraic (Colin Farrell) have been friends for decades. They live on a fictional island off the coast of the Irish mainland, in about 1923, as a civil war rages. There’s no fighting on the island, though, even as the sounds of gunfire and cannons echo across the water.

“Good luck to you” mumbles Padraic to them and himself as he walks down a path and sees flashes in the sky, “whatever it is you’re fighting about”.

One day, the first day that we get to know all these idiots, Colm decides unlike every other day of his life that he doesn’t want to go to the pub with Padraic at two o’clock. This immediately tilts the world out of kilter and portends dark doings ahead.

It’s not just Padraic that’s worried about the fate of the universe: the other village peasants wonder aloud as to what in God’s name is going on if Colm doesn’t want to have a pint with Padraic.

When Colm tells a disbelieving and profoundly confused Padraic that he doesn’t want to spend time with him anymore, Padraic is singularly unable to grasp this new reality, the new way of the world. He spends the rest of the movie doing absolutely everything he can think of in order to restore the world to its previous axis, and Colm stolidly tries to do everything he can, with increasing desperation, to ensure that it doesn’t.

Let’s face it, Padraic is something of a fucking idiot, and after spending two hours with him I can totally see why Colm prefers his own company or the company of others. But in a place as bleak as Inisherin, even Padraic can be given a run for his money in the idiocy stakes. He’s not even the village idiot. That honour is bestowed upon the local policeman’s son, being Dominic (Barry Keoghan), who is constantly saying awkward or cringey things in a child like sing song voice, despite no longer being a child.

But it’s a testament to Padraic’s own stupidity that he turns to Dominic for advice on how to win back Colm. Padraic’s determination to either laugh it off or pretend like the break is only temporary pushes Colm to declare that if Padraic speaks to him again, he’ll cut off his own fingers.

It’s meant to be a “what the feck?” moment for those of us in the audience, too. One of the main reasons Colm has given for wanting space, for wanting peace and quiet, for wanting to not have to listen to Padraic’s inane prattle any more, is that he longs for time to himself in order to play music and, most importantly, to write music. He feels like his time on this earth is limited, and that the more of it he squanders with Padraic, the less likely he is to leave behind anything of meaning, beauty or as a legacy.

He plays the fiddle, that’s his instrument, and it’s one for which he needs his fingers and thumbs. But in order to compel Padraic to leave him be, he’s prepared to cut them off, thus rendering himself unable to do the thing he so desperately wants to do.

And still Padraic doesn’t get it. His need to make Colm like him again, his inability to move past it, means both men will pretty much doom each other, with so few alternatives.

There are no shortage of people to tell Padraic that he’s fecking dense, including and especially his sister Siobhán (Kerry Condon), with whom he lives, who observes each new dumb thing he tries to do with increasing exasperation. Siobhán is the one person on the island who doesn’t want to stay on the island. Everyone else is determined to stay in the well worn peasant grooves that they’ve lived in their entire lives and die the same way, but she dreams of somewhere else and something else far from the paralysis of places like this.

She’s the first to acknowledge that Padraic is a limited chap, in his way, and barely literate, so barely capable of talking about the one thing she cares about, being books. But she’s also the one to point out to Colm that all the men of their fecking island, him included, are limited, dulled beings, set in their emotionally shut down ways and moribund customs.

The Celtic cross, and statues of the Virgin Mary are everywhere, looming over everything. We’re meant to never forget what power the Church holds over these people. Neither the Church, nor the cops in this instance can do anything to stop the conflict between former friends.

If anything, they’re only going to make things worse, especially since the local priest can’t stop his impure thoughts about other men, and the local garda is a violent, sadistic drunkard and abuser of his own son.

This stuff is played for laughs. I can’t believe that this stuff, and the cop’s violence, sexual and otherwise, against his son, is played for laughs. I know depicting devout peasant Irish people as drunken, violent child-abusers is a cliché known around the world, but…wait what?

I’m going to say something that’s not controversial, no-one’s going to come after me for saying it: This flick has lovely performances, especially from Colin Farrell and Kerry Condon. The setting is awe-inspiring. It’s shot beautifully, the music is lovely, the village feels like a real place. And I get that the rupture between Colm and Padraic is an allegory for the Irish Civil War. None of that is controversial.

But I find it staggering that this flick is as acclaimed as it is. Fecking staggering. Even with a period piece setting I think if I was Irish I would find this so cringeworthy, having other audiences see this internationally would make me want to die of shame. It feels about as genuine as a franchise Irish pub, just with extra clichés.

Not to spoil anything, but once Colm starts lopping off his own fingers and throwing them at Padraic’s door, the film flicks past black comedy into farce. The self-destructive lengths the lads will go to because of their inability to express emotions in a healthy manner is played for laughs, but devolves into a strange, hard to take farcical level where people will rather burn each other’s houses down that ever back down in an argument.

If it strays from cliché, it’s only when the shift occurs from where the chap who says he’s a nice guy (something which too many women have heard from too many men, Irish or otherwise, that they’re the “nice guy”, why doesn’t anyone like the “nice guy”, why, if you reject this “nice guy” once again they’re going to threaten to kill you or someone you care about). And while we, at first, might understand where Colm is coming from, his character’s behaviour becomes more baffling and less comprehensible the longer everything goes on. At times he seems to be protective of Padraic, at others of leading him on, so to speak, and I felt like screaming at so many people so many times “just fecking leave already!”

Despair. The Irish, as depicted here, are drowning in despair, and it makes them do stupid things. They reject life long friends, or burn their houses down, they cut off their own fingers, or start wars, or drink to distraction / incontinence. There’s nothing illuminating about this, from this. I don’t find this to be a deep meditation on the bonds of men or the difficulties of friendship, nor do I find it a revealing depiction of life during the civil war.

It’s at best an amusing take on stubbornness, on male pride and intransigence, and little more. Even Colm, who talks about why he calls the song he’s writing “The Banshees of Inisherin”, says it’s only called that because he likes the repetition of the “sh” sound multiple times.

It’s not because there’s an actual banshee, in the desiccated form of Mrs McCormick (Sheila Flitton) harbingering death all the time, warning people that someone’s gonna die, and then showing them where the bodies are. Very nice of you, Mrs McCormick, very helpful.

How this can be so celebrated, so lauded, when it’s simultaneously so twee and so aggressively monstrous in parts – it’s baffling. Perfectly well acted, well scripted, but jeez louise, ugly, unilluminating stuff, for me.

7 times the irony of Padraic’s last words “any time” at the end out of 10

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“ I just... I just have this tremendous sense of time slipping away on me, Padraic. And I think I need to spend the time I have left thinking and composing. Just trying not to listen to any more of the dull things you have to say for yourself. But I am sorry about it. I am, like.” - The Banshees of Inisherin