The Banshees of Inisherin (Preview)
Reviewed by Ciara Moloney

Produced by Graham Broadbent, Pete Czernin, and Martin McDonagh; written and directed by Martin McDonagh; director of photography Ben Davis; edited by Mikkel E. G. Nielsen; costume design by Eimer Ní Mhaoldomhnaigh; production design by Mark Tildesley; music by Carter Burwell; starring Colin Farrell, Brendan Gleeson, Kerry Condon, Barry Keoghan, Gary Lydon, Pat Shortt, and Jon Kenny. Color, 114 min., 2022. A Searchlight Pictures release.

In 1994, as an unemployed twenty-four-year-old alone in the family home in London after his parents moved back to Ireland, Martin McDonagh—despite, by all accounts, having gone to the theater only twice in his life, and only then to see film actors he admired—wrote seven plays, six of which were set in the west of Ireland, the location of many of his childhood holidays. There was a trilogy of plays set in the Galway village of Leenane—The Beauty Queen of Leenane (1996), A Skull in Connemara, and The Lonesome West (both 1997)—and three plays set on each of the Aran Islands, Ireland’s westernmost outpost, only two of which—The Cripple of Inishmaan (1998) and The Lieutenant of Inishmore (2006)—ever saw the light of day. The third Aran Island play, The Banshees of Inisheer, remained unproduced and unpublished, due to being, in McDonagh’s words, not “any good.”

It’s unclear whether McDonagh’s new film, The Banshees of Inisherin, is a reworking of that material—which he once mentioned wanting to revisit when he got older—or if, like Colm (Brendan Gleeson) says in the film about titling a piece of music “Banshees of Inisherin,” he just likes the “sh” sounds. But either way, it’s his first work for stage or screen to be set in Ireland since that original group of plays, and his first with Irish characters since Colin Farrell starred in 2012’s Seven Psychopaths using his own accent. Set on a fictional island off the west coast of Ireland—one whose name literally translates as “the island of Ireland”—and filmed on location on Inishmore and Achill Island, The Banshees of Inisherin has an air of triumphant return about it, like Alfred Hitchcock coming back to the U.K. to make Frenzy (1972). The result is a marriage of what McDonagh does best on stage and on film. It’s a pitch-black tragicomedy that, like his best plays, pulls the Irish nation apart at the seams, and like his films In Bruges (2008) or Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri (2017), has moral and theological seriousness between the shock humor punchlines.

The Banshees of Inisherin is set during the Irish Civil War in 1923; something that only becomes clear a little bit into the film, in part because McDonagh has played with old-timey imagery of Ireland enough before that it doesn’t jump out as a period piece. Eimer Ní Mhaoldomhnaigh’s costumes are boldly unnaturalistic yet slide easily into the historical setting: rather than dark, muted colors, she dresses the characters in bright yellows, reds, and blues, making the big, black overcoat worn by Colm (Brendan Gleeson) cut an even more striking silhouette. The Civil War setting doesn’t stick out also in part because Inisherin is remote enough to be isolated from the bloodshed on the mainland. Siobhán (Kerry Condon, Better Call Saul) asks her brother Pádraic (Colin Farrell) if there’s any news in the paper. “Just the civil war,” he deadpans. It’s a backdrop to the story’s real action; a much smaller, weirder conflict that resonates with the Civil War even as it’s not quite clearcut enough to call an allegory.

It starts when Pádraic does what he does every day: he calls by Colm’s house at two o’clock, intending to have a pint together in the island’s only pub. But when he calls, Colm ignores him. He continues to be evasive and distant, much to Pádraic’s bafflement. Eventually, Colm has to sit Pádraic down and tell him why he’s being so weird—he doesn’t want to be friends anymore. Pádraic is, Colm explains, extremely dull, and, at his age, he’d rather devote more time to his fiddle-playing than listening to Pádraic go on for two hours about what he found in his donkey’s excrement.  

Pádraic does not take it well—or, more accurately, he doesn’t really take it at all. He remains baffled and continues to pester Colm no matter how many times he tells him to go away. Eventually, Colm escalates things, embracing the madman theory and threatening to cut off his own fingers if Pádraic doesn’t leave him be. (Colm says Pádraic left him no option, to which Pádraic counters that he had loads of options before getting to fingers.) But the madman theory, it turns out, doesn’t work if both of you are actually mad. And so across the water from Ireland’s bloody, pointless Civil War, Pádraic and Colm find themselves in a bloody, pointless war just for two…

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