The Banshees of
Inisherin
Cert 15 |★★★★★

Oscar-winning British-Irish filmmaker Martin McDonagh (Seven Psychopaths, Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri) is reunited with his co-stars Colin Farrell and Brendan Gleeson from In Bruges (2008) in this whimsical dark comedy set on a remote island off the coast of Ireland during the country’s civil war.

The Banshees of Inisherin premiered at the Venice Film Festival last month where Farrell won Best Actor and McDonagh took home the Golden Osella for Best Screenplay.

Also starring Barry Keoghan (The Killing of a Sacred Deer) and Kerry Condon (Angela’s Ashes, The Shore), the film is released in the UK by Disney under its Searchlight Productions offshoot.

It’s set on Inesherin island in 1923. Every single day at exactly two o’clock in the afternoon, amiable islander Pádraic Súilleabháin (Farrell) takes the short walk between the cottage he shares with his sister Siobhán (Condon) to have a drink and a chat with local fiddle maestro and his best friend for many years, Colm Doherty (Gleeson).

The Banshees of Insherin 4

Colin Farrell

When one day Colm fails to show up to their usual meeting place, Pádraic calls at his friend’s house only to be told that Colm no longer wishes to be friends with him.

Wounded by this development, Pádraic demands to know what he has done to deserve to be shunned, but Colm simply refuses to be associated with him in any way.

Colm insists that he just wants to be left alone and that if his former friend persists, he will be forced to cut off his own finger and give it to him to prove he is serious.

As their acrimony further develops, the two former friends find themselves at loggerheads in a deadly game of dare, which culminates in a shocking and heartbreaking event.

There is something genuinely unsettling about McDonagh’s film.

With mutilation used as an ongoing motif to symbolise the fallouts from a senseless civil war, The Banshees of Inisherin has also a lot more in common with the simplicity of films such as Robert Bresson’s Au Hasard Balthazar than anything he’s done before.

Just like Bresson, McDonagh’s film uses the stillness of expression of farm animals and pets to represent Pádraic’s purity of soul and his eventual transformation once that innocence is taken away from him.

The Banshees of Insherin 2

Colin Farrell and Barry Keoghan

Farrell gives a career-defining turn as the quietly seething nice guy whose whole existence is transformed overnight. Gleeson delivers yet another brilliantly measured performance as a man teetering on the edge of reason and sanity.

Allegories aside, The Banshees of Inisherin is a film that encapsulates the complexity of the human condition while presenting a work of profound emotional expression about what it feels like to be pushed to one’s limits.

Not a single shot here is left to chance and in the end we are left bereft, and changed for ever by this simple, yet hugely effective story.