The Banshees of Inisherin (2022)

This review mainly focuses on the writing in the film. Contains spoilers.

After writing what was possibly one of my least favorite screenplays of the 2010s, somehow McDonagh has followed it up with my favorite of the current decade so far. The Banshees of Inisherin realizes the potential of the writer who made In Bruges rather than the one who made Three Billboards. Maybe I’m just glad he’s not fumbling around trying to tackle American racial politics and policing inequalities, or maybe he’s got Edgar-Wright syndrome where his words only truly work coming from the mouth of his perfect thespian analogue (i.e. Simon Pegg/Colin Farrell). But nevertheless, I will stop the pseudo-psychoanalysis that I and many others on this site often enjoy foisting on unwitting writer-directors and instead constrain my praise for this film to its own merits—of which Banshees has many.

1923: outside of the Troubles, it was easily the most chaotic time in 20th century Irish history. The previous few years saw both the end of the First World War, in which over 200,000 men from the island fought, and the Irish War of Independence. The Anglo-Irish Treaty both established the Irish Free State and began the Irish Civil War in ’22. A split occurred when the treaty was signed—much of the IRA and a sizable portion of Sinn Féin opposed many of its conditions, particularly that the Free State would be a dominion of the British Empire. The treaty was ratified by only a seven-vote majority (64 to 57). Then began the war between the pro-treaty and anti-treaty segments of the IRA. Most civil wars tear friends and families apart, but the peculiar tragedy of the Irish Civil War was that it set revolutionary brothers in arms against one another.

Banshees takes place during this tumultuous time… but on an island off of the island. We see no armed conflict. The war is referenced as an event happening elsewhere, across the water (perhaps similarly to how Sing Street depicts the UK as a mythical place on the other side of the Irish Sea). Even among the Irish islands, the isle of Inisherin is particularly sheltered from the nationwide strife due to the simple fact that it is pure fiction. It’s a very interesting choice of McDonagh’s—he could have just picked an Aran Island (such as Inisheer which was the setting of his unproduced play) or named the movie The Banshees of Achill and called it a day, but instead, Pádraic (Colin Farrell) and Colm (Brendan Gleeson) live on land that never existed.

Then what is this isle of Inisherin? Well, it’s basically plucked straight out of my Irish professor’s least favorite film, John Ford’s The Quiet Man. In it, John Wayne returns to his character’s birthplace of Inisfree, a fictional village presumably in County Mayo. It’s the perfect stereotypical bucolic Irish idyll: grassy hills and adorable townspeople. Inisherin is largely the same as Inisfree. Outside of Dominic’s (Barry Keoghan) troubled home, it is a place uncorrupted. There are no ants under Pádraic’s white picket fence.

The problem is, Colm doesn’t see it that way. Or rather, he doesn’t feel it. He’s got a bad case of existential dread. Material analysis produces no explanation for his psychological state: his needs are fully met, he’s sheltered from the war, and he’s free from daily obligations other than his occasional music lessons. And yet, a darkness brews within him. In the face of the unexplainable, what does one do? Go about finding an answer. First, Colm visits his local priest (who, I will note, is likely not really all that local considering we see him arrive on a boat)—while we first see their interaction take place right before act two, clearly Colm had been consulting the priest long before the film’s events. Unfortunately, their meetings in the confessional are often contentious and anything but edifying. At one point, the priest asks, “How’s the despair?” “It’s back a bit.” “Ah, well… that’s too bad.” End scene.

So Colm must find the answer elsewhere. It’s right there in front of him: Pádraic. No, Pádraic isn’t the cause of Colm’s sorrows, and I doubt Colm deluded himself into thinking he is, but in the absence of an identifiable reason for his melancholy, Colm manufactures one. Out of thin air, he brings conflict to paradise.

Quickly, an aside: I must address our main character and Colm’s scapegoat, Pádraic—put plainly, he’s never thought long or hard enough to ever risk an existential crisis. It’s just never occurred to him. He’s essentially one of those adorable townspeople from The Quiet Man put center stage. Has a film ever concerned itself, to this extent, with such a simple man?

It would be easy to draw a few parallels between the Inisherin quarrel and the Irish Civil War and leave it at that, but I don’t think McDonagh is attempting a straightforward allegory here. Instead, the war across the sea serves to elucidate the particular modernity of the Pádraic-Colm rift. The Provisional Government and the IRA shared many things. Ethnicity, culture, history, land. They even shared an ideology up until ’22. The feuding neighbors are very much the same. They practically live on top each other, and encounters are inescapably frequent—there is only one pub in town, after all. Yet, the thrust of these conflicts are very different.

England’s tortuous process of tying Ireland into a tightly wound skein began, properly, in 1542 when Henry VIII was declared King of Ireland. It only began coming undone nearly four centuries later, so contention was inevitable on the outset of newfound independence. It needed answering swiftly: what is our relationship to the British Empire? It was such a consequential question that Irish society remained divided along that line for many generations. Predestined by the Tudors, fueled by British ammunition, the Irish Civil War was all but assured.

Pádraic and Colm’s war was not. While Colm’s inner demons needed sorting out, there existed no such consequential question within his relationship with Pádraic. The film begins with Colm abruptly terminating contact with his former friend, leading to Pádraic’s haphazard investigation into the matter. Common storytelling structure leads us to believe that something must have occurred between the duo before the events of the film, and that with time it will be revealed, but McDonagh shoots that down early and with concision. Pádraic did absolutely nothing—this war is, seemingly, completely arbitrary.

“Fella killed himself, over Rosmuc way. Walked into a lake for himself. Twenty-nine and nothing wrong with him,” gossips policeman Peadar with the local busybody. “Nothing wrong with him”… what a curious phrase, one that, I’d presume, has changed meaning over the years. Bloodshed among brethren? While occasionally temporarily justified in the minds of many, certainly both early-20th-century dwellers and us modern folk would agree that war is a blight on civil society—something has gone awry when your people are killing each other. Whatever led to such violence is a “wrong,” if you will. On the other hand, before Colm made his self-mutilation intentions clear, would any of his neighbors say there was anything “wrong” with him? How could there possibly be anything “wrong” with this Quiet Man of Inisherin?

Of course, nowadays mental health is on the forefront of the conversation. In 2022, watching Colm, we can confidently state there is something “wrong” with him (although we may not use that verbiage). We even pride ourselves on this advancement, our newfound openness and understanding.

There was a span of time, when I was actively using Instagram, that every other post stated the poster’s intent on taking a “mental health break.” They always had big chunks of text, stream of consciousness, possibly rambling, much like this review, explaining every trouble that beset them. I’d presume I wouldn’t hear from them for a while, but then they’d be back on the app the very next day. Then elsewhere, every mass shooting is acknowledged by conservatives with supposed concerns for the psychological wellbeing of the country. Just like the Instagram users, they drop that act by the following morning.

So we, the educated and informed viewers of The Banshees of Inisherin, confidently and democratically decide that Colm is disturbed. What to do? There’s no use in identifying the ailment if we lack the cure—but maybe these days we have it. Plenty of it in fact. Put bluntly, would Lexapro have kept Colm his fingers? Zoloft? We seem to have gradually shifted from “get over it” to “here’s some pills” over the last hundred years, and in some ways that is progress. Even if the extent to which we take mental health seriously in the 21st century is a charade, it is a simple reality that in a land flowing with milk and SSRIs, Colm likely would have kept his fingers.

So meet modern-day Colm: on Prozac, sixty-seven and nothing wrong with him. Divorced twice. He sees his son from the second marriage every so often, and he at least lives in the same state as his kids from the first, he thinks. He claims he’s been semi-retired since the last recession. Still has his dog, still plays the fiddle.

… dang it, he just had a week-long manic episode that ended in a clash with a Target employee. Doctor says how about we try Zoloft again? Okay, back to Zoloft. But now Colm is wondering why his doctor sounded like he was asking a question while prescribing him the medication. I mean, his voice raised at the end of the sentence. Did you hear it, too? He’s young; maybe he just sounds like that. Didn’t expect to be making sociolinguistic calculations at the doctor’s office. Maybe I should ask about the meds I saw on TV the other day. End scene.

I will be totally honest: I’ve never really experienced depression myself. I’ve never felt a profound unexplainable despair like Colm. Perhaps I’m a Pádraic, at least at this stage in my life. I’ve always thought, even if everything else falls apart, I can just gorge myself on Thai food and watch a movie I haven’t seen before. Like Pádraic could drink a pint and chat with his donkey. We’d wither away the way we lived.

Meanwhile, the Colms of the world think differently. I have a few in my life. My father, Ray, comes to mind, a man I’ve never witnessed have a sustained moment of deeply felt happiness in my 23 years of knowing him. I believe we only talked twice in 2022. We met up for dinner sometime in April, all was going well, pleasantries all around, what have you been up to, etc, etc—until somehow the conversation led to him confiding in me that recently he had contemplated suicide. While usually he is a man of unyielding hyperbole, at least momentarily it struck me as an attempt at some version of sincerity. What do you think is the appropriate reaction to being told something like that? What response is he expecting? “Dad, you should go to therapy,” maybe? Except I’ve been to a therapist with him, and any of their endeavors at inducing self-reflection within my father is like trying to probe a brick wall. He still claims he regularly meets with “more than one” therapist, as if seeing multiple increases the odds of having a breakthrough. “Change your meds,” possibly? He’s been taking an ever-evolving cocktail of esoteric drugs for decades—he even at one point, while I was in middle school, found himself stuck in a hospital for weeks, having nearly died because of a drug interaction missed by his psychiatrist. So all I could say was “Huh” before the waitress came to our table. I ordered pad see ew.

On the other side of my family, I’ve got my grandmother, Dee, who I love dearly and who would likely murder me if she ever found out I compared her to my father (luckily she can’t operate a computer). She is also a Colm, sometimes. Lately more often than not. In 1998, she was diagnosed with kidney cancer. They got it taken care of very quickly, removing the kidney, and she went into remission. However, she abruptly stopped doing a number of things she loved. For instance, before the surgery, she played tennis quite often, and it was one of her primary social activities. That completely stopped, and even after her energy came back, her enthusiasm for the sport had faded. My mother claims it took her about five years to fully recover. Then in 2019, we found out that the cancer had metastasized. The prognosis was incredibly unspecific. Hypothetically, based on the metastatic cancer stats, she had about two years, but there were a million other variables at play. What variables exactly? Eh nobody could say. Who knows, those two years could be a generous estimate. So Dee, with a co-sign by her husband, basically decided she was dead by next week. She has been living with that state of mind for nearly four years, despite the obvious irony.

Dee grew up in a poor family on a farm in the middle of Indiana—she had an uncaring father, chores that included slaughtering chickens, and no indoor toilet. Consequently, her entire life after escaping that purgatory of an existence, she has sought stability for herself and her loved ones above all else. She and my grandfather have been very successful in that regard, setting up comfortable lives in Texas that they’ve enjoyed for decades. Then the return of her cancer shook her to her core. The world had failed her. She’d done everything right. “I never smoked; my husband was the one who smoked.” “I raised my kids right, even if one of them divorced a psychopath.” So then she landed in the nebulous space between “Why me?” and “Of course it happened to me.”

Although Ray and Dee likely share current states of mind, the difference between them is clear: the origins of her suffering are well established while his are as foggy as they can possibly be. Besides the fact that my grandmother is often in physical pain, the inevitably along with the capriciousness of the timing of her death has got to be agonizing. My father, on the other hand, seems to have this bundled-up black ball of despair deep within him, locked inside by his own insecurity about its existence. The only evidence of it still enduring within him is his antisocial behavior rather than any sort of admission, save for that brief moment at the Thai restaurant.

Ebert once said that “the movies are like a machine that generates empathy.” I agree for the most part, but only certain films are specifically what I’ll call “empathy plays,” ones in which a character is tasked, along with the viewer, to empathize with another character. Mike Leigh makes these sorts of movies almost exclusively, even if some of them are covert. Secrets & Lies is of course one of his best—essentially, it’s a complex web of intersecting burnt bridges in need of repair. The Purleys and Hortense are challenged to connect with one another, and in the end, they are successful. It’s an empathy success story.

A Woman Under the Influence is another example that springs to mind, probably because it is my favorite film of all time. I guess I have a proclivity for this kind of story. One character is the outcast, Mabel, and her family, particularly her husband, must find a way to truly understand her or else risk losing her forever, either to a never-ending cycle of institutionalization (which was sadly not uncommon for women at the time) or death, as implied by the final moments of the film. Cassavetes chooses to leave it ambiguous as to the ultimate outcome.

Banshees is also an empathy play, but it is a story of abject failure. Up until this point in the review, I’ve developed a dichotomy between the Pádraic-types and the Colm-types, casting Pádraic and possibly myself in the scapegoat role, innocent victims preyed upon by the depressives. Besides the fact that we all fluctuate between these two roles throughout our lives, even restricting the analysis to only this moment in time, the relationship between these two men isn’t that simple. Colm gives Pádraic five chances to try and understand him before lopping off the first finger. Five chances, three of which are extensive conversations with Colm explaining his reasoning for wanting the friendship disbanded. Naturally, Pádraic responds to him with incredulity given the suddenness of the request, but the issue is that he gets hung up on the details, the underlying attack on his sense of self. “We’re talking about niceness … I’m Pádraic Suilleabhain, and I’m nice.” he says. Unfortunately, Colm must move on from “nice.” It’s too simple of a word for a man as he grows old and thinks of death. But the sense in Colm’s reasoning is no matter at all. Pádraic won’t hear any of it. To the very end, side-by-side, looking out on the sea, he won’t hear any of it.

The film is one of the few that I can find, at least that spring to mind, to demonstrate a failure of empathy between only two individuals. There is plenty of precedent as related to groups—Satantango, for instance, was centered around a village’s failure to comprehend the needs of its youngest inhabitant. Before that, Do the Right Thing was about the severance of civilities between the white Italian Americans and black Brooklynites. And before that, Canoa: A Shameful Memory concerned itself with the discord among Mexicans in the late ‘60s, students against working townsfolk. All three involved neglect and foundering attempts at communication, but they dealt with the dissolution of entire communities rather than interpersonal relationships.

This focus on a single relationship, and then leading it to a place of no mutual understanding at all, is, in movie terms, basically leaving your film without a resolution. This is not to say the ending is ambiguous. In fact, it is quite plain: the feud is not over. It will continue. “Some things there’s no moving on from.” Two good men went to war. Not a war of sociopolitical need but a particularly modern tragedy, fully fathered by the mind. Tragedies are often too pleasurable to watch—not here. Neither won, neither lost. Fittingly, a wholly unsatisfying ending.

My natural reaction is, well, I don’t want to end up there, on that beach, next to an old friend, stubborn in my ways. I don’t want to assume things are alright with the Quiet Man or Woman standing next to me or to shove on them whatever cure-all I saw recently on TV. Imagining my grandmother standing there—it’s the easiest task in the world. Of course, she receives all the emotional support I could possibly give her. It is always incredibly frustrating seeing her squander her final years worrying about the end, but that mental predicament is here to stay, and helping make her comfortable during that time is the best I can do.

My father… that is another can of worms. I know I am, at least at the moment, unable to forgive a person, a parent especially, who has said they wish I’d drown. He has left voicemails that would make Alec Baldwin blush. So forgiveness may be out of the picture for now, but empathy is another matter. I believe empathy is a learned behavior. Simple empathy, like seeing someone get hurt and immediately sympathizing with their pain, is cultivated at a very young age, but I think these more complex empathetic situations require a bit of outside reading. I can’t help but see my father in Colm—around 70 with little to nothing to show for all those years. Deep-rooted despair. Now, with it all reflected on screen, I can see that Ray and Colm have their own journeys. Unlike Pádraic, I voluntarily estrange myself from my father’s story, and, with proper appreciation for his troubles, I allow it to run parallel to my own. For some things there is such thing as moving on.

Even given the risk of sounding like a sociopath, I’ll fully admit Leigh and Cassavetes have aided my understanding of the people around me. But if you would have told me at the beginning of 2022 that I would be saying the same thing about the Three Billboards guy, I’d have chopped the fingers off me fiddle hand and chucked them at ya feckin’ door.

Rating: 5/5