THE BANSHEES OF INISHERIN

Martin McDonagh | 2022 | Ireland United Kingdom United States | 1h54m | Presented in the original English audio with English subtitles

THE BANSHEES OF INISHERIN begins with one of the simplest break-ups imaginable. On a small island off the west coast of Ireland, Colm tells his lifelong friend Pádraic that he simply doesn’t like him anymore. Pádraic, played by Colin Farrell, can’t understand what he’s done wrong. Colm, played by Brendan Gleeson, has decided that life is too short to spend talking to someone he finds dull. What starts as hurt feelings gradually becomes something much more obsessive, stubborn and destructive.

One way to read the film is as a miniature civil war. McDonagh sets the story in 1923, while the Irish Civil War is taking place across the water, close enough for the islanders to hear the gunfire. Pádraic and Colm were friends the day before their relationship suddenly fractures, just as former allies in Ireland’s independence struggle found themselves fighting one another after the Anglo-Irish Treaty. I don’t think the characters map neatly onto political factions, and the film doesn’t need them to. The more interesting parallel is emotional: people who once stood together become enemies, and the original disagreement slowly gets buried under pride, grievance and retaliation.

That reading becomes harder to ignore as the conflict escalates. Colm tries to punish Pádraic by mutilating the very hands he needs to play music, damaging himself in order to hurt someone else. Pádraic responds by becoming increasingly vindictive in return. By that point, friendship has given way to a cycle in which every injury seems to demand another. To me, that makes the distant Civil War much more than background. It turns a ridiculous disagreement between two stubborn men into something larger about the self-destructive logic of civil conflict, where winning can mean destroying the same community, relationships and culture both sides once shared.

I’ve included THE BANSHEES OF INISHERIN because it’s probably the most internationally recognisable Irish film in the week, but also because it connects directly to several other films in the program. Farrell and Gleeson reunite here fourteen years after IN BRUGES, also screening on Saturday. The difference between the two films is part of the fun. IN BRUGES is fast, urban and criminal. BANSHEES is rural, slow-burning and almost absurdly intimate, but both are built around the relationship between two friends.

THE BANSHEES OF INISHERIN premiered at the Venice Film Festival, where Colin Farrell won the Volpi Cup for Best Actor and Martin McDonagh won Best Screenplay. It went on to receive nine Academy Award nominationsincluding Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor for Farrell, supporting nominations for Brendan Gleeson, Barry Keoghan and Kerry Condon, and Best Original Screenplay. It also won four BAFTAs and three Golden Globes. By the end of its awards run, it had become one of the most internationally celebrated Irish films of the decade.