The Banshees of Inisherin (2022)'s comments

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Siskoid

Colin Farrell, Brendan Gleeson and Martin McDonagh team up again for The Banshees of Inisherin, an unusual story of a friends' break-up, reinventing the tropes we associate with a romantic break-up, and while in the modern world, you can generally take the ghosting and move on, on a small Irish island in the 1920s, losing your one friend is a much bigger deal. Setting it during the Irish Civil War is no doubt a mirror of the situation, setting brother against brother, and highlighting the underlying absurdity of the conflict. This bleak comedy provides a lot of character humor and we chuckled throughout, but also so heavier, emotional moments, so I'm not gonna say there weren't tears too. There are a lot of expressive animals, companions filling in the holes the lack of humans have left, and it's notable that the "smarter" friends has a dog whose breed is known for its intelligence, while the "dumb" one has a miniature donkey (and very sweet it is). The film doesn't withhold the reasons why one friend would want to break off with the other, but it's nothing melodramatic (though perhaps the consequences reach those heights), just very human. While Gleeson and Farrell are very good, Kerry Condon as the latter's sister is sort of the audience's stand-in and extremely effective. Gold star to Barry Keoghan as well, playing the very last rung of the friendship ladder with gusto. And such stark cinematography, it's gorgeous to look at too.

1 year 5 months ago

Fonzleclay

Fecking great!

1 year 5 months ago

SpacePauls

Brendan Gleeson gets two thumbs up!

1 year 2 months ago

frankqb

A lovely parable for how human connection is eroded until uncivil deeds make civil hands unclean.

5 stars out of 5

1 year 2 months ago

xianjiro

quote:
Have I gone feckin' mental?

The dog's the second smartest one of the lot -- the smartest, reads, then up and left. Amen

1 year 1 month ago

hawkeyevigo

Pedantic fool that I am,it takes two to tango gets a mention in a film set in 1922 but according to this..The phrase refers to the South American dance tango, which requires two partners to perform. It originated in a 1952 song Takes Two to Tango by Al Hoffman and Dick Manning and gained popularity subsequently as an expression. Source: theidioms.com.Anyway,enjoyable enough althought the donkey in the house did smack of paddywhackery.

1 year 2 months ago

zheller667

Just further evidence that Martin McDonagh is one of the best writer/directors working today. This film firmly shot him into my top 10 directors of all time, although I still think I enjoy In Bruges the most. At this point, with three films under his belt, you know exactly what you're going to get with this: amazing characters that drive the plot, humor, dark meditations on fate and how we can affect it, and amazing dialogue. McDonagh has also evolved a lot as a director, with his camera capturing some truly beautiful vistas. This and Fabelmans are my favorite films of the year.

1 year 3 months ago

BLJNBrouwer

"Do you have impure thoughts about men, Father?

- I do not have impure thoughts about men. And how dare you say that about a man of the cloth?

Well, you started it."

1 year 1 month ago

epicureanlotus

Like all of British-Irish playwright Martin McDonagh’s work, The Banshees of Inisherin is a character-driven film, but it can feel frustrating, because these are not characters who learn or transform or grow. Sure, they change over the course of the film as they react to one another, but they never confront themselves or attain what could be called a character arc. In fact, this is principally a film about loneliness and isolation, and each character seems to have their own distinct method of avoidance and distraction. Less like characters in fiction and more like humans in the real world, they just are the way they are, and they worry about the way they are, but they never reach a grand epiphany, and their story cannot be contained neatly in a two-hour frame.

Technically speaking, the film is executed brilliantly. The acting is nuanced and evocative, the script authentic and unpretentious, the dialogue able to imply so much with so few words. The camerawork and production design truly invite you into the disarmingly quaint world of 1920s rural Ireland, despite the omnipresent boom of warfare resonating (symbolically) just out of view. Moreover, the film’s measured pace gives each moment and scene plenty of space to breathe, plus the audience plenty of time to ponder and reflect, calling upon us to fill in the gaps of what the characters don’t say and of what their actions really mean. I couldn’t help but compare this film to Everything Everywhere All at Once, its competitor at all the awards shows this year: a work that moves at a breakneck pace, throws images and ideas in the viewer’s face, and doesn’t leave much to think about or unravel once the credits roll. Personally, I found Banshees to be the more engaging, original, and expressive film.

That being said, it did leave me feeling a bit cold, and I wish we had been able to see more. I suppose McDonagh is telling us that we have seen everything we need to, that we now know the characters well enough to extrapolate how they will continue behaving and interacting, that the ennui and the despair and the egocentrism and the dogged tenacity will always be there and will never change, and the rest we can figure out for ourselves. If one thing’s for certain, it’s that The Banshees of Inisherin leaves audiences the same way it leaves its characters: cold, a bit lonely, and with a lot still to figure out. It’s our choice whether we face what we have seen or avoid it, like them, with our habitual distractions.

1 year 1 month ago