‘The Banshees of Inisherin’: Existential Horror off the Coast of Ireland
Given what Martin McDonagh puts his characters through in his latest bloody confabulation, The Banshees of Inisherin, and how poorly they explain and understand it, putting too much stock in what they say might be unwise. At one point, Pádraic (Colin Farrell) asks his until-recently best friend Colm (Brendan Gleeson) the name of the song Colm has been composing on his fiddle. Told it’s “The Banshees of Inisherin,” Pádraic asks why. “I just like the sound of the double ‘sh’s,” Colm replies. He might even be telling the truth. Of course, this is a man who has threatened to slice off his fingers one at a time if Pádraic does not stop talking to him. So Colm’s judgment and clarity might be questionable.
Set in 1923 on the Aran islands off Ireland’s west coast, the movie is both specific to its setting and timeless. The scenery is staggering, eerie, and bordering on unreal. It is no wonder the camera lingers on the rich green fields cross-hatched by short stone walls, the sharp seaside cliffs that resemble ancient castle fortifications, stone crosses, dark-cowled and witchy women, and the arching sky whose sun-broken clouds seems ready to unleash a squadron of trump-blaring angels at any moment. In such a seemingly pristine bubble of pre-modernity, you might expect a filmmaker to either wrestle with ancient truths or indulge in wee nostalgic blarney. Instead, McDonagh uses the island’s beauty to obscure the deadly isolation that lies beneath it.
By the time the movie starts, Colm has already reached his fateful decision, though Pádraic has not realized it. Stopping by his best friend Colm’s house as he apparently does every day on the way to the pub, Pádraic is rebuffed but thinks nothing of it. When Colm does show up at the pub — like everything else on the island, a lovely and lonely place with a million-dollar seaside view that serves only to remind everyone of their tiny place in the universe—after rebuffing Pádraic again, he finally makes his point clear: “I just don’t like you no more.” Pádraic, a cowherd who spends much of the movie with a wrinkled brow, is confused. “But you liked me yesterday.” Maybe Colm didn’t like him. Maybe Colm never liked him. Maybe everything taken for granted on Inisherin is up for questioning.
The ostensible hook of The Banshees of Inisherin is the low-key horror of Colm’s dark promise to mutilate himself if Pádraic doesn’t stop pestering him. Anybody familiar with McDonagh’s theatrical resume, especially the interest in madness leading to bloody squabbles that powered A Behanding in Spokane and The Lieutenant of Inishmore, will have an idea of just how serious Colm is once we see a close-up of the long sharp shears he plans on using for the deed. At the same time, fans of McDonagh’s first film, In Bruges, which also paired Gleeson and Farrell as respectively a gloomy ironist and none-too-bright lunk with limited impulse control who have spent far too much time together, know that the bleakness will be lit by frequent jabs of comedy.
It’s a good thing, too, because behind Colm’s Grand Guignol threat is something both more mundane and more frightening. Pádraic’s confusion and hurt feelings are initially comical, particularly when he takes refuge in the company of his faithful donkey, to the chagrin of his roommate and sister Siobhan (Kerry Condon). But once the comfort of Colm’s company is taken away, everything about his life seems up for grabs. He starts up a friendship of necessity with Dominic (Barry Keoghan), the ostensible village idiot who Pádraic looks down upon if only because he needs someone to feel superior to. Meanwhile Siobhan, Pádraic’s seeming only other true relationship, quietly plots to leave for a job on the mainland once the madness of her brother and Colm’s squabble highlights everything to her wrong about the stifling nature of Inisherin. She is a sister in spirit, if not in deed, to Emily Watson’s mother in Salea David and Anna Rose Holmer’s God’s Creatures, another woman stuck in a remote Irish community suffocated by vengeful men.
“How is the despair?” The visiting priest (David Pearse) asks Colm in the confessional. While Pádraic is casting about for something else to do besides sit at the pub with Dominic and milk his cow, Colm is crumbling under a grey existential fog. Convinced he needs to do something else with his life but have dull chats with Pádraic, he sets out to write a song. Failing that, a violent interlude seems to be his way of not just running out the clock until natural causes do their work.
The Banshees of Inisherin pairs a crisp dramatic clarity and whistling-past-the-graveyard comedic tone with an underlying melancholy, the latter being a somewhat newer development in McDonagh’s work. A more stripped-down affair than the comic gangster stylings of In Bruges and Seven Psychopaths, and less ostensibly topical than Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, it carries its themes lightly.
Though the Irish Civil War is raging, the remote islanders only experience it through the echoes of far-off artillery fire. The constable (Gary Lydon), the closest thing the island has to an out-and-out villain, is excited to take the boat over to help out with an execution but cannot remember whether it is the Free Staters killing an IRA man or the other way around. The connection between a faraway senseless conflict and one right at home is not hard to miss, but McDonagh does not overdo it. The movie relies more for its dramatic build on the slow-boil of Colm’s threat and the ripple effects from their increasingly dire yet inexplicable conflict. As relatable as Siobhan’s frustration over that fight might be, the real horror is not the possibility of Colm’s self-mutilation, but the fact that nobody in the movie has a good answer for the despair driving him to do it.
Title: The Banshees of Inisherin
Director/writer: Martin McDonagh
Cast: Colin Farrell, Brendan Gleeson, Kerry Condon, Barry Keoghan, Gary Lydon, Pat Shortt, Sheila Flitton, Bríd Ní Neachtain, David Pearse
Studio: Searchlight Pictures
Year: 2022
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