“How’s the despair?” The question is repeated through The Banshees of Inisherin, Martin McDonagh’s existential howl of a comedy that brings to mind everyone from Samuel Beckett to Abbott and Costello, sometimes within the same scene. Set on a green, craggy island off the coast of Ireland in 1923, this is an uncanny, indefinable film about the seismic repercussions of a friendship rupture. Its intimacy is quietly startling. The despair, it turns out, is quite wonderful.
Colin Farrell is Padraic, a pleasant enough chap who lives with his sister Siobhan (Kerry Condon) and his beloved miniature donkey Jenny in a rustic little cottage. Padraic’s idea of a good time is to down a few pints at the local pub with his best buddy, Colm (Brendan Gleeson). Except Colm has suddenly decided he doesn’t like Padraic — thinks he’s dull and a waste of time. And what’s more important than time, especially when you’re getting on in age and you only speak to a few people each day? Padraic, for his part, is shattered. His life is even smaller than that of Colm. Aside from his sister, his only other friends are the barkeeps and a young man (Barry Keoghan) who’s a bit of a village idiot.
What did Padraic do to alienate his drinking buddy? Absolutely nothing. The sting of absurdity wafts over The Banshees of Inisherin, floating through its cottages and shops and its single church, where the flustered confessor does his best to provide comfort. The film has the sparseness and shape of McDonagh’s best film, 2008’s In Bruges, except it’s even more pared down and exacting. It’s also oddly gentle, especially given the bloody turn of events that escalates the interpersonal clash into something almost biblical.
McDonagh’s dialogue and storytelling can have a hyper-adroit, eager-to-impress, imitation-Tarantino quality (see 2012’s Seven Psychopaths). But not here. Words in The Banshees of Inisherin are wielded with great care, like precious cargo. Long pauses and silences give way to cutting, laugh-out-loud exchanges that hang in the air. Key lines of dialogue become leitmotifs that elegantly return. In Farrell and Gleason, McDonagh has perfect instruments, actors who know each other’s rhythms and are generous enough to yield the floor for just the right amount of time. The film has a precision that never feels overly mannered or stiff. The actors anticipate each other’s moves like seasoned jazz musicians. Not a note is wasted.
Farrell and Gleason also shared the screen in In Bruges. In that film, they played hit men passing the time in the fablelike Belgian town of the title. As the ancient walls begin to close in, it becomes clear that these two men love each other in a platonic but very meaningful way. Banshees is a different kind of fable. It’s about what happens when the affection curdles, at least for one party, and the primal sting of “I don’t like you anymore” sinks in and festers. There are physical injuries inflicted in Banshees, even self-mutilation, but they don’t match the pain of companionship severed.
Farrell, long a compelling presence playing Irishmen and Americans, digs deeper than ever here. Padraic has something of the confused, wounded child about him. Emotionally, he’s still of that age when a single friendship can be one’s entire world. You never question the depth of his injury. It’s written across Farrell’s face, in the eyes that suggest that, no, everything is not going to be OK. Gleason is equally strong as the straight man who just wants to be left alone, burdened by a cosmic sense that his life isn’t what it’s supposed to be, that his time is growing shorter and it’s time to cut loose excess baggage, including his former friend.
McDonagh gives his characters a stage of harsh beauty, gray rocks and green grass set against an endless sky captured in compositions that emphasize the empty space. The Banshees of Inisherin is actually a parable of the Irish Civil War, the cannons of which can be heard in the distance. This may resonate with native viewers, but knowledge of the history isn’t necessary to reel from the film’s punch. At times, Banshees feels like an absurdist Western, in which the antagonists sling words instead of guns and the roughest landscape is the human soul.
McDonagh has a way of casting the perfect actors for every part, big and small, perhaps because the best actors line up to speak his dialogue. In this case, that includes Condon, conveying a quiet desperation to be somewhere, anywhere, else. And it includes Keoghan, fidgety, lonely, and dim, but decent. The bit players are terrific as well, including Sheila Flitton as an old hag who makes prophetic pronouncements in the manner of a Greek chorus and Gary Lydon as a bored and sadistic cop who appears to be the only policeman on the island.
This is an isolated universe, invented solely for the purposes of the film. It is the stuff of myth, but it’s also painstakingly specific, from the rough-hewn culture of the local pub to the general store/post office overseen by the village busybody (Brid Ni Neachtain). It’s easy enough to imagine this as a stage play, but Banshees is also intensely cinematic, with its verdant valleys and shadowy interiors. And just when you’re immersed in the tension and the doom, something happens to make you laugh your socks off. The Banshees of Inisherin follows you out of the theater and sticks around a while, its tragedy and comedy wrestling for space in your head.
Chris Vognar is a culture writer living in Houston.
