'The Banshees of Inisherin' A Review

The Banshees of Inisherin is a drama(billed as a tragicomedy) about two friends in a small island community in 1922 Ireland who "break-up". Pádraic(Colin Farrell) goes to meet his friend Colm(Brendan Gleeson) for their routine afternoon pint only to be ignored by Colm, later at the pub Colm tells him he no longer wants to be friends and not to speak to him. Pádraic struggles to accept this and tensions ensue.

Farrell's considerable talents are extremely muted by the character which is described as dull and dim, which is what we see, there are two brief moments when Farrell and the character come alive one when he's drunk the other when he is grief-stricken. But that's really it. A "dull and dim" character written/portrayed explicitly as such, with little depth, little understanding, little maturity, just isn't really that interesting especially given he is the lead. You don't really care about him, which is fine, but also the circumstances aren't interesting enough to engage with beyond him. Gleeson has a bit more depth but he too is constrained by the whole conceit of the script. Who gives a shit about these two hot-headed, frustrated, emotionally stunted, knuckleheads, I don't. Kerry Condon as Siobhán, Pádraic's sister, is the only character(and the only performance) that actually feels dimensional, feels human, but she's mostly a supporting character, relevant narratively only through her relationship to her brother. Barry Keoghan shows up and does fine I guess but he is doing the exact same twitchy half-wit characterization that we've seen from him before multiple times (most recently in The Green Knight).

The film looks beautiful, sweeping rich panoramics of this Irish island, expansive stone walls, jutting cliffs, animals chomping grass, its gorgeous. The score is not particularly effective with the same discordant theme hammering over and over again to bludgeon us with "something is amiss!" the diegetic songs are wonderful and offer the only hope and grace in the whole thing. Tonally its confused, at times it seems to want to play as realism, other times allegory, it kind of slides from one to the other based on cinematic convivence calling into question the effectiveness of either style.

As a portrait of loneliness I suppose it is functional but it is thin, anemic, it offers no real insights on the human condition and doesn't really portray humanity with any real affection or understanding beyond the superficial. More broadly what the hell does this thing have to teach us we didn't learn over the course of the pandemic. Compare this with A Love Song which mediates on solitude and the yearning for connection but does so in a way that is empowering and hopeful, that speaks to resilience rather than despair.

Not funny enough to counteract the simplistic, undergraduate, existential fumblings of it's main theme.

Currently in theaters, coming soon to VOD.

Don't See It.