The Banshees of Inisherin: A film that envelops life in a harshly warm embrace
Sometimes, harshness can be equally warm and comforting, because, it contains an ingredient that makes life worthwhile, the Truth.
In Irish legend, a Banshee is a female spirit whose wailing warns of a death in a house.. But, in a quiet contrast, there’s no one wailing in the film. On the contrary, this film feels like a silent letter, sent to the viewers, which is sometimes comforting, at other times alarming, but most of all, empathetic to its core.
Inisherin is a remote village off the coast of Ireland where life is painted in scarce colours. There is a lot of green grass, but very few herders who graze their flock upon it. The gloom surrounding this cold coast makes the sea appear dark-grey. Even darker are the clothes of the people who live on this island. We see an elderly woman aimlessly roaming the village with a scythe. She is the darkest of them all. Almost black. In contrast to what exists down on earth, the film has shots of a bright blue sunny sky looking down upon Inisherin that appear intermittently as the story of this dark tragicomedy unfolds. Haunting scores of choirs singing in the background when these shots appear give the sky an unearthly quality.
It is all quite magical.
Just like the colour palette of Inisherin, the life on the island is scarce. It has been stripped off of the many pleasures the city dwellers unconsciously enjoy — malls, markets, building, and has existence in its barest form. On the entire island, there is one herder, one shopkeeper, one bar, one church, and one harbour where most men seem to work. It works very well for the film, because to address the internal thoughts, and lay bare open the dynamics of human relationships, as in life, there can be no distractions, to really see that which we hide from, in the mundaneness of everyday life. So, the film takes place on an island.
But, despite the lack of a gigantic canvas, Banshees is not a small film from any account. How can a movie about the universal feeling of going through life, a shared experience of every human on earth, be limited?
The film opens with just another day on the island when Pádraic Súilleabháin, played astonishingly well by the much able Colin Farrel, visits his lifelong friend Colm Doherty, played by Brendon Gleeson, and asks him to accompany him to the village pub, as it was 2 PM and like every single day before this day, it was time to go down to the pub. Only this day, Colm is sitting silently in his house, overwhelmed and disgusted by the monotony of his life, including this pointless ritual. Thus, he refuses to come. With the resolve of a man who knows what he wants, that morning, he decides to end his friendship with Pádraic Súilleabháin.
While this is not taken very seriously by Pádraic at first, he soon understands the gravity of the matter when Colm threatens to self mutilate his fingers one by one for every time Pádraic talks to him. The threat is as hard hitting as much as it is absurd, given that Colm is a folk musician who needs his fingers to pull the strings of his violin, and any mutilation of his hand would be mutilation of a dream he has come to nurture.
I want to create a tune that outlasts me. No one will remember any of us, but the music lives, says Colm, who is yet to make a tune that plays for the people long after he is gone.
And this is when, right at the start, Banshees becomes a universal film. It makes a daring announcement of being on a mission to give us something new. Through a man, now in his sunset years on earth, failing to have found meaning of his life but committed to breaking the monotony even at the cost of his own flesh and blood, writer-director Martin McDonagh tells a very humane story.
A story about people having to live the lives that they have come to have for themselves, urging inside, hoping, praying — please God! let it be more than it is.
And to find meaning, some leave for a pilgrimage, some leave their partners, some change professions, and here, on just another afternoon on Irisherin, Colm decides to end his friendship with Pádraic. Why? Because now he finds him painfully dull.
And like some butterfly effect, this one decision sets the wheels of change in motion for the entire island and reveals the struggles of the dwellers as they go through life. Siobhán, Pádraic’s sister, played by Kerry Condon (who was exceedingly excellent in Dune), unlike Pádraic, feels the despair of her life head on and longs to leave one day to the other side and live in the city. She does not know if that new life will be correct for her, but is aware that there is nothing on this island for her.
Her underlying view for her life on the island is apparent when as she says to Colm in a scene, ‘he is dull?….dull?…Are you freking jokin’ me? Every one of you is freaking dull on this freaking island!’
In another scene, an angry shopkeeper says to Siobhán complaining angrily, ‘You never tell me anything!, thus establishing the lack of contentment on this isolated island.
But just like any human, even considering the mammoth task of changing their lives, Siobhán cannot simply leave. Especially for the life of her brother Pádraic, who now abandoned by his only friend on the island, is crumbling.
And what follows in the story is how this supposedly nice man Pádraic, loses all sense of self just because his friend calls him dull. It is as if a man, who thought he could go through his life by smiling at strangers, being nice to them, and by drinking beer every single day at 2, was suddenly slapped into awakening by a reality that he has denied to acknowledge in his lack of disregard for monotony. It is as if he thought he could make life nice by being nice, and if it was not for a piece of a bloodied finger that Colm chops off his hand and throws on Pádraic’s door, he could have gone about believing so.
But we soon see how Pádraic’s niceness is hollow. He perpetuates this image by embracing it in concept as a way to go through the life in the best way he could fathom. But we see how at any non-nice treatment by any villager peels off this mask and transforms him, even if momentarily so, from a man both elevated and alienated by being nice, to a man much more angry, and much more human.
Pádraic is a man with grave inability to be alone. When abandoned by Colm, Pádraic starts spending more time with Dominic, a young teenager unanimously considered to be a dimwit and a creep. While Pádraic agrees, in his loneliness and abandonment, he sits and shares a drink with Dominic every evening because he is nice.
Dominic, for him, is both an object of company and of veiled ridicule, as he acts as a reminder to Pádraic that his life might be shit, given how the turn of events had revealed the co-dependency and shallowness of his nice existence, yet, it is not as bad as Dominic’s, who has been collectively written off by the village. He might be dull, but Dominic is duller by miles.
In this potluck of events challenging the characters’ beliefs and patterns, as we see this story unfold, we as viewers feel an attack on our beliefs and patterns. Like characters going about their lives on this remote island, we too, who live inside the remote island of our flesh, acknowledge that we have felt these thoughts and lived these patterns.
So, we empathise with Colm’s need to break them, Pádraic’s need to sustain them, and Siobhán’s need to escape them. And with this empathy, the writer-director Martin McDonagh makes it everyone’s story. Through this movie, just like the top view shots of the island, he says I see you. And as the viewers watch this movie, they in turn see themselves.
The death of niceness and the coming back to life happens for Pádraic’s with the demise of Jenny, his beloved donkey, probably the only being outside his sister that he really cared for. It occurs soon after the old lady in black carrying a scythe tells Pádraic that a death, maybe two, shall come upon the Irisherin.
And so they do.
And, this is where the screenplay takes yet another turn, turning it into a masterpiece, by telling the viewers that it is not a simple tale of two friends but has life and death woven in every frame. Pádraic hides behind a wall when he encounters this deathly woman, but she stands and waits for him to re-appear, which he does, to check if she is gone. And just like any deadly encounter, this mere meeting on the road with this woman, acts as a jolting reminder to both Pádraic and the viewer that while life goes on, death is lurking close by. And the fact remains that it does not care about enmity, self mutilation, broken friendships, or dreams.
But do not let this make you think for a second that this is a hopeless story. In fact, it is quite the opposite. The movie begins with Pádraic visiting his friend Colm’s house and trying on the lifeless masks that hang on Colm’s walls. So, when you see these very masks burning and melting away in the final sequences, you know what it was, that burned away. The lies we tell ourselves, to go about our everyday existence.
The Banshees of Irisherin is set in the tail end years of the Irish Civil War in 1923. A war fought between the the provisional government or Ireland and the IRA, and till date, has its mark on the political atmosphere in the country. This choice of the era, a chapter in history about the beginning of two opposing forces in Ireland, makes Banshee more than a movie, as one cannot help but notice how the film too tells a story of two friends who have come to be at loggerheads.
It makes one wonder why do wars happen? Why is it that when we encounter despair in life, some think niceness can save them, while some think it is the sacrifice of niceness that can help them create a tune that will outlast them? And while the world becomes binary and fights, could it be that the opposing forces are nothing but best of friends who don’t see a way forward yet? Who just thought the other was dull. Who just wanted a little bit more than the usual. And who could not help but create chaos, break patterns, to feel a little more alive as they await death.
The Banshees of Irisherin could be a big contender for the best movie at the Oscars this year. Make sure you catch it now. It plays on hotstar in India.
