Banshees of Inisherin: The True Best Picture

 

THE BANSHEES OF INISHERIN (2022)

Directed and written by Martin McDonagh

Searchlight Pictures, 114 minutes, R (language, violence, brief nudity)

★★★★★

 

 

The Banshees of Inisherin was easily the class of all Oscar-nominated films for Best Picture. It didn’t win any Oscars, but it’s often the case that the Academy fails to honor quality.

 

The Banshees of Inisherin is Irish, stylish, and quiet, even when violent. Call it the kind of film even the reconstituted Academy deems too “European,” whatever that might mean. It is set in 1923 during the Irish Civil War. In brief, today’s Republic of Ireland won a measure of independence from Great Britain in 1921, but aspects of the peace treaty led the Irish to turn on each other. Especially vexsome for the Catholic south was that six Protestant counties that now make up Northern Ireland remained part of Britain.  

 

Other than distant rumbling and artillery flashes on the horizon, the Civil War had little impact on Inisherin. The movie was shot in the Aran Isles off the coast of Galway, though director Martin McDonagh took steps to disguise that. The cinematography is spectacular, but Inisherin is fictional–it translates as “island of Ireland”–because McDonagh’s wished to depict its insularity, not situate it within any broader upheaval. His tale is deeply individualized and psychological, not political. 

 

Inisherin is ruled by patterns. Grasp that, or you’ll not understand how a small spat upends the social balance. Padráic Súilleabhin (Colin Ferrell) and Colm Doherty (Brendan Gleeson) customarily meet at a set time to share pints and small talk at the local pub, the village’s only real focal point. One day Colm informs Padráic that he doesn’t want to talk to him again, his explanation being that Padráic is “dull” and too “nice,” and he’d rather devote himself to his music. This strikes Padráic as unsatisfying; everyone in Inisherin is so dull that it’s as if collective depression rolled in with the morning tide. Only the global folk art inside Colm’s house hints of intrusions from the outside world.

 

Padráic has no other friends aside from his live-in sister Siobhán, and his donkey Jenny. The very thought of being abandoned by Colm throws Padráic into a petulant existential crisis. The more he pesters Colm, though, the deeper his resolve to be left alone grows until he, the village’s premier fiddle player, tells Padráic that he will cut off one of his own fingers each time Padráic speaks to him. Alas, Padráic is too despondent to stay silent even after Colm flings the pinky of his fiddle hand at Padráic’s door. And so it goes, though everyone in the village tries to warn Padráic to back off.  

 

The gruesome, symbolic shedding of blood also severs other frayed village norms. With exception of the local publican, everyone in Inisherin is so frozen in place that they echo each other’s remarks. We witness subplots involving Dominic Kearney (Barry Keoghan), a cleanliness-challenged youth who functions as the village “eejit,” though there’s a later revelation involving his swaggering father Peadar (Gary Lydon), a brutal local Garda (policeman). Poor Dominic is so damaged that he dares wonder if Siobhán would be his girlfriend. She too is at wit’s end and applies for a library job on the mainland. Even the local priest is disengaged and operating on autopilot. Stasis is so pervasive that when Padráic loses his temper and announces he’s tired of being nice, Colm announces that Padráic hasn’t been that interesting in years. By then, though, the damage has been done and there’s no turning back.

 

“The Banshees of Inisherin” is the name of the fiddle piece Colm is writing before he loses his digits, so we never actually hear the film’s namesake tune. The overall score by Carter Burwell really enhances the film, but know that in Irish folklore banshees are ominous female spirits that portend death. McDonagh has claimed there are no banshees in the film, but I suspect he was having a joke on reviewers, as Mrs. McCormick (Sheila Flitton) meets all bansee criteria and locals go out of their way to avoid her. Banshees is a film in which metaphors abound and the borders blur between myth and reality. Failure to get that lies behind the complaint of several Irish critics who charged that McDonagh dealt in stereotypes. My advice to them is: Don’t be so bloody literal! The Banshees of Inisherin is unsettling, but take the preceding advice and marvel at this small pot of gold.

 

Rob Weir