The Banshees of Inisherin

Two middle-aged white men sit at a table outdoors with pints, speaking seriously. Sweeping landscape of sea and dirt path road in background. Overlay: Mediaversity Grade C-

“Two women are the voices of reason in a maelstrom of absurdity in The Banshees of Inisherin.”

Title: The Banshees of Inisherin (2022)
Director: Martin McDonagh 👨🏼🇬🇧
Writer: Martin McDonagh 👨🏼🇬🇧

Reviewed by Elaine 👩🏻🇺🇸

Technical: 4/5

The Banshees of Inisherin opens on an idyllic tableau, complete with an angelic choir and double rainbow. Pádraic (Colin Farrell) strides happily down the street, off to collect his best friend Colm (Brendan Gleeson) for their regular pub date. Little seems to threaten this pastoral Irish island, and villagers barely notice the distant gunfire from mainlanders engaged in the Irish Civil War. But peace is not meant to last; this is, after all, a Martin McDonagh work (Three Billboards Outside of Ebbing, Missouri). The ensuing events feel like a Greek tragedy, utterly preventable yet tied to its bleak fate.

McDonagh’s assured directing has the straightforward blocking of a play: He frames characters in windows, and a cross of light bisects the priest’s face in a confessional scene. However, McDonagh is much more playful with his script, the real star of Banshees. It meanders and comedically repeats itself to emphasize the routine banality of a small village, or it bites down to the bone when tracking the sudden deterioration of friendship between Pádraic and Colm. Banshees acts as the setting for not only for the great battle of these actors’ skills but also their delightful reunion after their memorable foray in McDonagh’s debut In Bruges (2008).

On that note, we can’t forget the supporting characters: a phenomenal Kerry Condon as Pádraic’s sister Siobhán, and Barry Keoghan as Dominic, both of whom nearly steal the show. No one on Inisherin is quite perfect, but the characters’ disarming vulnerability and humanism makes Banshees so much more engaging.

The film could be a fairy tale, albeit one of Grimm’s original ones complete with grisly amputated appendages. It has expressive animal sidekicks, absurd turns of events, and a magical climate that only allows rain to fall at night. Banshees is stronger when McDonagh keeps the allegorical parallels vague, the real-world events at a distance (literally and figuratively). We don’t need them to draw our own conclusions from this cautionary tale about a personal argument that spirals wildly out of control.

Gender: 3/5
Does it pass the Bechdel Test? NOPE

Siobhán is clearly the most learned person on the island, an avid reader who corrects Colm when he places Mozart in the 17th century. Never one afraid to speak her mind, she nevertheless also holds a deep loneliness. Colm sees her as his equal, more so than the “dull” Pádraic, but tellingly, she couldn’t care less about him. Both Colm’s existential wrestlings and his argument with Pádraic seem beyond belief (and stupidity) to her, and she ends up leaving the island, in no small part to save her own sanity.

The other female character of significance, although she holds precious little screen time, is Mrs. McCormick (Sheila Flitton), who serves as the harbinger of doom in the film. (The eponymous banshee, as it were.) She appears intermittently to portend a death, and like Siobhán, she represents a no-nonsense demeanor, at one point saying “I wasn’t trying to be nice. I was trying to be accurate.”

These two women are the voices of reason in a maelstrom of absurdity ratcheted up by Colm and Pádraic. They’re both unheeded though, and exist as outsiders—Siobhán by stint of her intelligence and Mrs. McCormick because of her otherworldliness.

Race: 1.5/5

Working within the confines of a small Irish island in 1923, there’s not much racial diversity to speak of in Banshees. McDonagh is British Irish, born and brought up in London to Irish parents. However, he’s received criticism for his broad depiction of cultural tropes, including from Irish author Mark O’Connell, who addresses “[Banshees’] deployment of the hoariest Irish stereotypes, which—and maybe this is just because I’m Irish—seem to me even broader than the vacuum-packed Americana of Three Billboards.” It’s certainly fair to consider how McDonagh’s created a fantasy of Ireland, with the sweeping green landscape (where, again, it never rains during the day), a rollicking dialect of Hiberno-English, and the frequent pub visits.

On the one hand, it’s doubtful that McDonagh wanted to simulate reality in this fable-like story. On the other, its decision to loop in the actual events of the Irish Civil War to parallel Pádraic and Colm’s feud feels a bit clumsy. O’Connell says:

You’d have to think of the Irish Civil War as some kind of basically unfathomable squabble between former best friends, as opposed to a conflict over a treaty with the British government that granted only partial independence and divided Ireland into two political entities, to disastrous results. As a political allegory, it seems obviously retrofitted, tacked onto the narrative to add unearned resonance.

Mediaversity Grade: C- 2.83/5

McDonagh’s cocktail of the bitter and blackly funny isn’t always palatable, but he balances it with a sprinkle of warm humanity on top. Come for the highly spirited performances, stay for the undulations of Farrell’s eyebrows.

Like The Banshees of Inisherin? Try these other titles set in Ireland or Northern Ireland.

Grade: CLiFebruary 8, 2023