Review: THE BANSHEES OF INISHERIN

Colm has gone off his lifelong friend Padraic. He gives no better reason than that he finds the younger man dull. Padraic is astonished before he is hurt and then when he is hurt he is possessed of the need to at least discover the real reason or to find a path of reconciliation. The small island of the coast of Ireland makes it impossible for the pair to avoid each other without unthinkable personal engineering and they are frequently at the same pub spreading the awkwardness like tar. Colm's enigmatic revulsion for Padraic takes him to the extent of a threat to cut off his own fingers until Padraic leaves him alone. At first this seems like the kind of joke these hard joking people might play on one another.

But then before we have registered it, the mood darkens and the possibility of the joke vaporises, joining the mists that constantly hang overhead and dissipates while those below find life more troubling than they ever have. Across the water on the mainland the islanders are frequently shocked from their bucolic peace by the flashes and explosions of the civil war. Parable much? Well, why not? One character does point out the apparent absurdity that Irish are fighting Irish even after the English have buggered off. There's certainly a point in drawing the analogy, regardless of the lateness of the hour but this fable of despair digs further down than that. 

I read an article about troubled couples in which they came to a point when disgust turns up between them leading to irreconcilability. It was called the ick factor or moment. I can't remember which so I'll just call it the ick confabulatory progression toward contempt incident (or I would if that wasn't such torture to type). It sounds trivial to characterise a civil war as ick but scale it down to the personal and you can see without assistance, the break from acceptance of normality into a need for resistance and liberation. It carries a few problems: one is that once ick-ed no one recovers and get un-ick-ed and; contrarianism is a bullshit stance on anything and suggests an eventually meaningless protest. But that's the situation we have here, and I'll just suggest that if you've never been in a relationship that didn't at least approach the disgust of one for the other (regardless of whether it was acted upon or smoothed out before the danger point) then you probably lie convincingly to yourself. If you are a child, this kind of thing can be dismissed the next time you meet. By the time you are getting on and facing mortality you might well feel Colm's violent-minded erasure of the niceness of Padraic or Padraic's emptying bewilderment at finding it imposed.

Brendan Gleeson and Colin Farrell have worked together before in the wonderful In Bruges in which the former had to keep the latter out of trouble, a task that also led to a bleak despair. Here Gleeson's ungiving refusal plays increasingly disturbed until all we can see in his weighty silence is chaos. Farrell's Padraic gives us something like the seven stages of grief as we might express for those only on their eventual way to death. His brute beauty distorting into pain as his confidence in his own decency (he only ever goes as far as calling it niceness). Between them are the others on the island who variously seek an end to this disruption or nurture it. Padraic's sister Siobhan finds herself the sole voice of reason and healthy dissent for the situation's gravity. Kerry Condon's performance gives us someone fed up with insular life and its banshee like old women, corrupt cops, and nightmarish prying shopkeepers. Of course, she cares about her brother's troubles but is drawn to the mainland with its bombs, executions and street battles over this slowly collapsing rock life.

And that's where writer/director Martin McDonagh expertly helms us from our own potential despair at watching yet another epic of colourful yokel ways. We might start there but as the situation takes on water all that quirk takes its proper place as the idiom of dialogue. There are hard actions and bad results but none are the sudden left turns of poor film making. Everything that happens happens because these people are living in this situation. There is comedy as there always is with this film maker and he and his cast can flick it in and wipe it off with great deftness. If you were looking for a fun romp somewhere between Under Milk Wood and Whiskey Galore go back to those, this is a story of great human pain. That it is told with consummate skill and charm are actually incidental.