You won't see a stranger film from 2022 than The Banshees of Inisherin (written and directed by Martin McDonagh). You also won't see a better one. My husband and I saw it today in a mostly-empty theater (the afternoon showing); one can hope that the evening showings are more packed, because it's definitely not a film to miss. It's been described as a comedy, albeit a dark one, but I would describe it as more of a drama with some comedic elements and some bizarre (almost horror) elements. It's the story of a friendship between two men; one older--Colm (well-played by Brendan Gleeson), and one younger, Pádraic (wonderfully acted by Colin Farrell)--that ends abruptly one fine day when Colm decides he no longer wants to be friends with Pádraic whom he describes as dull. His explanation for ending the friendship is that he simply got tired of listening to Pádraic's inane conversation. Colm seems to have become acutely aware of his mortality and the legacy he will leave behind; he wants to be remembered as a musician rather than as a nice man who did little with his life, something Pádraic does not understand or really care about. The severing of the friendship leads to all sorts of nastiness, mostly on the part of Colm who is not afraid to act on his threats of what he will do if Pádraic does not stop pestering him to remain friends. And Pádraic continues to visit Colm in the hope that somehow the friendship will right itself and everything will continue on just as before--going to the local pub at 2 pm for their beers and hanging out until it's time to go home. The year is 1923, Ireland is in the middle of a civil war, and the island on which they live, Inisherin, a fictional island off the coast of Galway, is as far removed culturally and politically from the mainland as it could possibly be. The people who live on Inisherin spend their entire lives there and die there as well. Few leave. They are churchgoers, farmers, shopkeepers--simple folk--but underneath their genial surfaces lie a fair amount of cruelty, pettiness, malicious gossip, and small-mindedness. These are not people with whom one becomes friends with overnight, if ever, since it's hard to envision their accepting any outsiders into their fold. It's not difficult to understand that Pádraic feels quite hurt by Colm's actions and refuses to accept that the friendship is over, until he does, and by that point, we have been witness to the conversion (evolution) of a simple nice man into one capable of cruelty himself, driven to it by the cruelty of Colm and the local policeman Peadar, the latter who baits him and threatens to kill him after Pádraic calls him out for sexually abusing his son Dominic. Dominic is a sweet simple teenage boy who takes a liking to Pádraic's sister Siobhán (also wonderfully-acted by Kerry Condon). Siobhán is unmarried and lives together with Pádraic in their family's home; she takes care of the house, reads books, and generally appears fairly well-educated. Her life changes when she gets a job offer from a library on the mainland, which she takes. She knows that she is far too smart to end up as the wife of any of the men on Inisherin, and she is not afraid to say so. At one point during the film she tells Colm that all of the men on Inisherin are boring when he tells her that Pádraic is boring. And she's right. She's smart enough to know that she needs to change her life, and she does. Pádraic does not have her intelligence or the skills necessary to change his life; he likes his routines and does not really embrace change. He is a simple farmer at heart and remains one, despite the tragedies that unfold around him. For anyone who has experienced the loss of a friendship as he did, it's not difficult to relate to his hurt and his feelings of grief at the loss of something he valued so highly.
I wondered about the title of the film, The Banshees of Inisherin. The word banshee describes 'a female spirit in Gaelic folklore whose appearance or wailing warns a family that one of them will soon die' (Banshee Definition & Meaning - Merriam-Webster). There is an old woman in the film (Mrs. McCormick) who wears long black dresses and a black veil, whom some of the island residents refer to as 'the ghoul'. Several times she announces to some of the residents that one or two people are going to die, and there are in fact two deaths that occur. She qualifies as Inisherin's banshee. But Colm has written a song of the same name as the title of the movie, and he used the word 'banshee' because he liked how it sounded together with Inisherin; there is no logical reason for using the word other than that.
Every time one is tempted to say that life away from civilization, from the mainstream, is idyllic, along comes a film (like this one) that demonstrates otherwise. There is nothing idyllic about Inisherin. Yes, the landscape is lovely, but the people are not. Many of them are strange, some mentally-ill, others quite superstitious. They go to church on Sunday, but you can wonder why, for all of the heartless behavior they exhibit toward their neighbors and fellow residents outside of church. Granted, the story took place in 1923 and times were different then, but people are people, and those who live an insular existence remain insular in many ways. They may prefer that way of life and think they are better than the city folk they often criticize, but that is not necessarily so, and that holds true for modern times as well.
