THE BANSHEES OF INISHERIN gets 8/10 An ulti-mate-um

Directed by Martin McDonagh
Starring Colin Farrell, Brendan Gleeson, Kerry Condon, Barry Keoghan

8/10

The struggle between two aspirations is explored in this dry, yet laugh-out-loud hilarious new Irish tragicomedy that’s darker than Guinness. How do you spend your time in life: establishing a legacy for yourself, or simply spending it drinking, gabbing, and establishing friendships? The Banshees of Inisherin takes this idea and dramatises it in a way that’s so engaging in such a funny way.

When the “plot” of the film emerges, you wonder “is that it?” Colm (Brendan Gleeson) tells his friend Pádraic (Colin Farrell) that he no longer wants his company. What’s wrong with Pádraic? Not much, nice enough fellow, but Colm feels their conversations are too time-wasting, and he feels the need for more substantial conversations – or better yet, making art and music instead. Colm feels their conversations go nowhere and mean nothing, whereas the folk songs he creates could give him a legacy even after he’s dead.

Given the blunt nature of how he breaks off this friendship, Pádraic is confused and incensed with such a break-up. He retorts that their conversations aren’t meaningless, that they make up life itself. From here, we have an unstoppable force hitting an immovable barrier – no matter how adamant Colm is and no matter how insistent Pádraic is.

And that’s the premise of the film. A very basic one that could be written on the back of a match-box. And from this simple premise comes an immense study of two different men, the few tight-knit townsfolk that know them well, and the increasingly shocking and dark situations they put themselves in.

All of this seems so simple, yet from this premise emerges such a haunting tale that gets more twisted as it goes, involving rejection, rejection of rejection, honour, revenge, and eventually bodily mutilation. Coming from writer-director Martin McDonagh, who previously gave us In Bruges and Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, this feels almost like a film-writing exercise, as if how to extract the most from the simplest of “plots.” What’s going on on screen may seem skeletal, but what it conjures is very substantial, the kind of film that will generate conversations and arguments about these two characters, and how we can relate our own lives and how we spend them.

With such fantastic performances at the helm, along with stunning and thoughtful cinematography that places you right within this isolated Irish village at the tail-end of their Civil War, The Banshees of Inisherin is quite a stunner, a film that ponders the great question of life, all the while being so amusing and funny.

DAVID MORGAN-BROWN