The Banshees of Inisherin: My First Foray into Written Criticism
I’ve been doing movie reviews, in one form or another, since the age of thirteen, initially through unscripted YouTube videos, then Letterboxd, and now Letterboxd supported by Medium and Substack (I’m also eyeing Patreon, but that is likely a ways off.) The first review I recall being distinctly proud of, posted in late February 2023, was a piece on Martin McDonagh’s 2022 film The Banshees of Inisherin, a tragic dark comedy and fable recounting the unraveling friendship of Pádraic (Colin Farrell) and Colm (Brendan Gleeson), and the entangled lives of Pádraic’s sister Siobhán (Kerry Condon) and town outcast Dominic (Barry Keoghan). It’s not my best work, by far, showing amateur prose and structuring — something I’m still not immune from — and under-focusing on form and direction in favor of thematic/character analysis. But said analysis, I hope, still resonates. So, as my inaugural post on Medium, I am sharing this review.
Full Spoilers
TW// Abuse, Self-harm, Suicide
“I wasn’t trying to be nice. I was trying to be accurate.”
It took until my fourth viewing to fully understand that this isn’t the story of a fundamentally good and nice person’s moral degradation in the wake of losing everything. The tragedy is more in how he didn’t change than how he did. Pádraic is known as nice, “one of life’s good guys.” But he’s vapid, self-centered, and childish. His niceness is more nicety than kindness; a mostly apathetic veneer of pleasantness that’s mostly useless as any form of emotional support. He’s dismissive of Siobhán’s loneliness, uses Dominic’s abuse as a piece of gossip, and is unable to understand Colm’s artistic ambition. Colm’s handling of the situation is also childish and petty but there’s more emotional maturity behind his pain. He’s trying to distance himself from someone because he thinks it will improve his life. The extreme lengths he goes to are just as tragic as they are farcical; he commits self-harm, damaging his ability to play music: the very thing he’s doing all this for. But Pádraic also goes to comically absurd degrees, sending Colm’s friend home and committing arson/attempted murder. Colm commits self-harm to push somebody away, while Pádraic harms others as revenge for his failure to bring somebody closer. He seems to have become the opposite of the nice person he was at the start, strolling to his friend’s house with a rainbow in the background, (I’ll write about the queer subtext of the movie some other time) but his angry warpath is born of the same inability to process pain that his niceness was. The nice Pádraic believes the way to be happy is to avoid emotion, push down depression, avoid sad books, etc. When those around him choose other ways of dealing with their feelings he has to confront his own and fails miserably. He lashes out like a child.
“To the grave, we’re taking this. To one of our graves anyways.”
What makes it even more sad is that he’s given a way out several times. Colm begins to respect him when he confronts him at the bar because he actually says something meaningful. It’s not nice, but it’s meaningful. He only cuts off his finger after Pádraic visits him afterward and makes shallow vague apologies. Later, the two seem to almost reconcile when, backing down from his belligerence, Pádraic actually engages with Colm’s art, shows genuine empathetic joy, and makes a sincere attempt to be friends again. And Colm only rejects this when he learns about what Pádraic did to his musician friend. The two extremes Pádraic starts and ends at, shallow wishy-washy nice apologizing and belligerent anger both fail, but when he shows genuine emotion or a genuine worldview things seem to almost get better before his flaws come back to ruin everything. Pádraic is not an irredeemable dull arse. He loves his sister despite his inability to fully help her emotionally, cares for Dominic, and chooses to spare and take care of Colm’s dog. Even though his flaws destroy him, those shreds of goodness, genuine goodness, not just niceness, remain.
“Thanks for looking after me dog, anyways.”
“Any time.”
It’s not just Pádraic. This cruel apathy is in the heart of Inisherin. Despair isn’t a problem to be faced with the help of a community, but a secret to be shared in confession. Suicide is treated with disdain towards the victim. Self-harm is treated as a sin. Abuse is waved away and the victim blamed. Though it’s just one island, it’s a microcosm of the human experience.
“Do you think God gives a damn about miniature donkeys, Colm?”
“I fear he doesn’t. And I fear that’s where it’s all gone wrong.”
The Banshees of Inisherin is a beautiful examination of how people navigate this, for both better and worse. Whether Colm would have accepted Pádraic’s moments of growth and those moments of respect and reconciliation between the two would have stayed if Pádraic hadn’t messed them up immediately is uncertain. But oddly enough, Colm seems to find peace in the end anyways. He can no longer play music, but he still leads a group of musicians. He’s turned away from his dark path and is now with the people he wanted to be around; people who could understand and participate in music: the medium with which he expressed his feelings. Siobhán also manages to find a better environment. Leaving hurts, but she’s in a place that suits her better, has a better job, and is around people she gets along with better. Interestingly, they both process their emotions through art. In Colm’s case it’s a song named after mythic figures he believes watch the pain and tragedy with amusement. For Siobhán, it’s sad books that she uses to process her own emotion. It’s the same way I deal with it. I find comfort in painful art. Films, this film in particular, have given me an outlet to mourn things I can’t articulate. Something I can confide in about the pain of not having anyone to confide in the real world. Both leave Pádraic to pursue these things, but he can’t change his ways enough, can’t mature emotionally enough, to connect with these people and keep those he loves even as they move on. Instead, his life is consumed by conflict. Meaningless conflict. In a cruel way, meaningless conflict seems the outcome of meaningless niceness. Pádraic changed, but not meaningfully. He went from meaningless to meaningless; the same place, just lower. We opened with Inisherin bright and sunny as he walked to meet his friend. We end with Inisherin cloudy and dark as he walks back home. He has nothing left but conflict and a painful reminder of the humanity he’s abandoning.
“Some things there’s no moving on from. And I think that’s a good thing.”
It speaks to McDonagh’s skill as a dramatist and to the talents of every actor that a dark comedy about a handful of people on a small island is one of the most profound tragedies written and staged in the 21st century. The petty squabbles of two lonely men make the whole world feel like it’s unraveling. And it’s not just a play on film, it’s a richly cinematic and masterfully composed work of visual art. Both a soulful mythic fable and a pathetic farce. One of my favorite films of all time, and the single most important work of art to me at this time in my life.
“Maybe there are banshees too. I just don’t think they scream to portend death anymore. I think they just sit back, amused, and observe.”
