I was going to see The Whale next in theaters, but then I didn’t get a lot of sleep the night before. No reason for it that I want to mention here, but I was concerned I’d nod off in the theater due to lack of sleep. However, there was one other 2022 movie I wanted to see before 2023 starts, and that one was on HBO Max: The Banshees of Inisherin. I’d held off for now, mostly because it looked like the kind of movie that would be emotionally raw and I would need to be in the right mood to see it. You know, the same reason why I held off on Whiplash for as long as I did.
Turns out there were some rough emotions on display, but nothing like I thought there would be.
Near the tail end of the Irish Civil War in 1923, Irish dairy farmer Pádraic Súilleabháin (Colin Farrell) is living a fairly quiet life on a remote island off the Irish coast. There aren’t a lot of people there, and most of them are a bit on the eccentric side. Pádraic has a good friend in his longtime drinking buddy Colm Doherty (Brendan Gleeson), a local musician. However, Pádraic gets a bit of a shock: Colm doesn’t want to talk him anymore. He’d rather focus on his music and not have what he considers “boring” conversations with his well-meaning, longtime friend. Pádraic naturally wants to know why, and the more he tries to break through to Colm, the uglier things get.
The fracture between the two has repercussions across the small island, most notably with Pádraic’s sister Siobhán (Kerry Condon) and the local cop’s awkward son Dominic (Barry Keoghan). It’s a small community, and even if the Civil War isn’t happening on the island itself, that doesn’t mean that longtime friends, neighbors, and even family might not be split apart by a stupid feud over nothing. It’s just something where a lot of people will be hurt for no good reason, and some of that pain might very well be self-inflicted.
OK, I was expecting raw emotions, and quite frankly, it didn’t come out in the way I might have expected it to. There aren’t really any hysterical tears or anything along those lines, and the most shocking acts of violence happen off-screen. They’re also played as somewhat darkly humorous. Writer/director Martin McDonagh has always had an ear for dialogue and complex characters, so whatever happens is going to be a bit more complicated than “a heartbroken guy tries to win his friend back”. It’s that, but it’s also pointing out how stupid both Pádraic and Colm are being. Pádraic comes across, initially, as somewhat dumb in how he isn’t getting it, but it’s not exactly a huge island, and Colm knows the only pub is both of their favorite hang-outs. It’s just a pair of guys on a small island that wouldn’t know how to avoid each other if they even had to.
That said, for all that the movie plays as a dark comedy, and a fairly funny one at times, it’s a movie that ends on a very serious note. Things will be said and done that can’t or won’t be taken back, and the movie does an excellent job of showing how the end of a longtime friendship can really damage people. I would imagine it usually wouldn’t go this bleakly, but it does here. Gleeson and particularly Farrell are both great in this, and McDonagh put together another fine movie. Then again, I suspected that would be the case, and I still needed to be in the right frame of mind to enjoy this as much as I did.
Grade: A
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