From daffy and endearing to daft and despairing, but never dreary, dull or disappointing, THE BANSHEES OF INISHERIN is another feather in the film making cap of Martin McDonagh.
Fourteen years after pairing them in his feature film debut, IN BRUGES, writer director Martin McDonagh casts Colin Farrell and Brendan Gleeson as two acquaintances who find themselves at an improbable impasse when Colm (Gleeson) unexpectedly puts an end to their friendship.
Colm considers Pádraic (Farrell) dull and calls for a cessation to all communication and contact. Pádraic’s repeated efforts at reconciliation only strengthen his former friend’s resolve and when Colm delivers a desperate ultimatum, events swiftly escalate, with shocking consequences.
Set in Inisherin, a fictional island off the west coast of Ireland, April 1923, the film is back-grounded by The Irish Civil War, a canny contextual device by McDonagh that illustrates how the big picture is painted and hued by small brush strokes with bristles that can stray and mar.
The strangest of estrangements, a divorce of a kind, an existential crisis, THE BANSHEES OF INISHERIN makes a firm fist at examining the conundrum of reason conflicting with emotion, pointing out the absurdities of human behaviour, its frailties and fragility.
Farrell and Gleeson are superb, a double act of high comedy and multi layered friction.
The gallery of characters that populate the story are eloquently written and perfectly performed, from by Pádraic’s sister Siobhán played by Kerry Condon and troubled young islander Dominic portrayed by Barry Keoghan, to the creepy Mrs. McCormick played by Sheila Flitton, the physical embodiment of the banshee.
A lean, layered, literate and intelligent screenplay about stubbornness and stupidity that tickles your funny bone in one instance, then slaps you in the face, punches you in the solar plexus while plucking at your heart strings and doing your head in the next.
With echoes of Beckett, you’d do well to hear the call of THE BANSHEES OF INISHERIN.
