The Banshees of Inisherin

I'll bet many of you have been on both sides of the situation found in 2022's THE BANSHEES OF INISHERIN, which concerns a pair of longtime friends who suffer an abrupt severance.  Colm (Brenan Gleeson) wakes up one day and decides he no longer wants to speak to Padraic (Colin Ferrell). Just like that.  Buds since childhood.  Grabbing a pint at the tavern every day for years on end.  Colm will barely look him in the eye now, coldly rebuffing any reconciliations, or explanations.  At first, anyway.  I can tell you I have been both of these guys at different times in life, be it with friends or those who were more than that.  It is awkward and heartbreaking in differing ways for each individual.  Complicated. Necessary? Sometimes, but there are always two sides to consider, and a million interpretations.

Writer/director Martin McDonagh gets it all right.  Every ill feeling, every heart pang, every dramatic beat.  The self torture, here, quite literal.  There's real blood to be had in this film but the emotional and psychological violence and fallout are much worse. Devastating.  Never mind that his story takes place on an Irish Isle in 1923; the perceptions are timeless.  The film wastes no time with its set-up, and what seems to be a straightforward narrative is layered a' plenty.  The Irish Civil War is still brewing on the mainland.  Every so often artillery rings in the distance, causing the characters to stop and observe.  Do Colm and Padraic consider the parallels to their own developments? We certainly do, and another director might've hammered it all home to the point of insult.  Thankfully, Mr. McDonagh's touch is light but weighty enough to make the case.

But even if you ignore the war references and metaphors, you are still left with a powerhouse of emotion and heady rumination.  Colm will eventually explain his sudden behavior - he now prefers to spend his final years creating something that will be remembered centuries on.  As artists like Mozart did.  Colm is a folk musician and has decided to write pieces for the fiddle, rather than merely whiling the hours and days away with what he considers nonsense talk, all that he feels Padraic, a simple man who lives with his spinster sister Siobhan (Kerry Condon) and a cute, scene stealing donkey named Jenny, is capable of.   A nice man.  A decent man.  For Colm, that is not enough anymore.  Friendship, at least with Padraic, ceases to have value to him; this film gets some mileage out of that very idea.  He also describes his former compadre as "dull".

Siobhan, well aware of her brother's shortcomings and sad lot but always his defender (and vice versa), thinks all the folks in Inisherin are dull.  Except maybe Mrs. McCormick (Sheila Flitton), a crotchety old woman who hangs around the isle like a scepter of death, a walking bit of portent.  Will Siobhan take a job at a library on the mainland, leaving her poor brother even lonelier in their deceased parents' home? Will Colm ever get over himself? Will Padraic?

I won't give too much away, but THE BANSHEES OF INISHERIN, while often unexpectedly quite funny, will not exactly leaving you feeling all bright inside.  If you're seeking a WAKING NED DEVINE kind of experience, look elsewhere.  McDonagh's film is the best bit of melancholia to come out of 2022.  Its feelings are deep and real, and Ferrell (reunited with Gleeson years after McDonagh's IN BRUGES) is just fine as the rejected man who discovers maybe he's not so passive and simple after all by film's close.  Gleeson matches him.  Things get a bit gruesome along the way, though nothing that should test the mettle of sensitive viewers.  You may both laugh and cry (I did) during this film, and it's never less than earned in what proves to be a sometimes uncomfortably relatable few hours.  Quite often, this movie slayed me.  Nice to see I'm still able to have such a response in today's dank and ineffectual landscape of cinema.