Movie Review : The Banshees of Inisherin (2022)
The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences is historically known to nominate three different types of movie for its coveted award for Best Picture: a) popular movies meant to represent their connection to real moviegoing people (Avatar : The Way of Water, Top Gun : Maverick) b) lengthy, pompous and ultimately decent films that employ a lot of people (All Quiet on the Western Front, The Fablemans) or c) arthouse stuff no one's ever heard of to bolster their credibility. Films like Tàr or The Banshees of Inisherin.
There's always a winner (who’s category a or b), which is never the best film among the nominees. That film is often in category c and it is again this year. I’m not sure yet whether it's The Banshees of Inisherin, but this movie was so not what I expected.
The Banshees of Inisherin tells the story of two neighbors in a small Irish village in the early twentieth century. A simple-minded farmer named Pádraic Súilleabháin (Colin Farrell) and a tortured artist named Colm Doherty (Brendan Gleeson), who stop being friend at some point for a reason obscure to Pádraic. Heartbroken, he confronts his drinking pal over his sudden treason only to be met with Colm's steely resolve to self-amputate one finger every time Pádraic talks to him. Will they be able to coexist as strangers?
Colm Doherty and Legacy of the Forgotten
The easiest, most surface reading of The Banshees of Inisherin you can make is that it's a metaphor for the Irish civil war. One neighbour (Ireland) wants to leave and create his own legacy. The other (Northern Ireland) wants him to stay, but offers no viable reason to and resentment escalates from there. This is both accurate and boring. It's what writer and director Martin McDonagh wanted to say with The Banshees of Inisherin, but there's a lot more to it than that. It would not be this good if it weren't.
The Banshees of Inisherin is a heartbreaking movie because what drives Colm Doherty to sever his friendship to Pádraic Súilleabháin and, subsequently the fingers of his fiddle-playing hand, is inherently reasonable. He's afraid of dying and being forgotten. Why wouldn't he be? He's a talented fiddle player living in the middle of nowhere and who's done nothing with his life outside of boozing up and playing his fiddle at parties to get in local ladies' pants. Once he's gone, nothing will be left of him.
But what Pádraic Súilleabháin wants is even more reasonable. He wants a drinking friend to sublimate his daily frustration with. He doesn't care whether he will be remembered or not because he clearly won't. Their rift is heartbreaking because it is inevitable. One man would have to kill a part of himself to comply to the other man's wish and neither are emotionally equipped to make peace with it. The only way for this situation to resolve would be for Colm to accept his own insignificance, which is harder said than done.
Not dwelling on your own cosmic insignificance looks great on social media and most people will side with Pádraic socially, but what makes Colm the most relatable of the two in my opinion is that he never claims he's entitled to being remembered. He never says that he's a genius. His only wish is to leave something behind. Colm Doherty voices in an earnest and straightforward way a desire that inhabits most of us and severing his friendship to Pádraic is not a petulant decision in any way. It's very much a sacrifice.
Pádraic might be the nicest character and the more proper heroic figure of the two, but Colm is the most relatable.
Bergman, Beckett and the thing with hauntology
The Banshees of Inisherin is very much a haunted movie in the way of Derrida and Mark Fisher's hauntology. That means it is haunted by a cultural past that keeps poking through the narrative and calling attention to itself. First and most obvious culprit would be Ingmar Bergman's movie The Seventh Seal where the protagonist Antonius Block plays a game of chess with death. He says at some point in the movie that he wants to perform "one meaningful deed" in an otherwise pointless life, like Colm.
Visual and thematic quotations from The Seventh Seal are many and unsubtle in The Banshees of Inisherin. Death is represented in the movie by the character of Mrs. McCormick (Sheila Flitton), an old lady visibly connected with the spirit realm who appears out of the ether whenever a death is near. Martin McDonagh borrows from Bergman's masterpiece's atmosphere by drawing a parallel between the plague-ravaged landscape of the former and the soulless, endless present of a submissive Ireland.
It's blunt, but it works.
The other major hauntology of The Banshees of Inisherin is the tongue in cheek humour of Irish writer Samuel Beckett. Absurd, but always slightly tragic, it informs the actions of Pádraic and Colm like an invisible guiding hand. Waiting for Godot is a particularly strong influence on the tone and setting of the movie. The character of Dominic (played to perfection by Barry Keoghan) is, I believe, the most hauntological of them all, serving no purpose but to remind the characters of the absence of future in their own purgatory.
Now, why is this movie haunted and what purpose does it serve? I believe it was an efficient and intuitive way of representing the historical weight on Pádraic and Colm's shoulders and reinforcing the civil war analogy that was important to Martin McDonagh in the first place. The Banshees of Inisherin doesn't work if you don't believe the rift between the two friends in inevitable and terminal. They are not adults being petulant, they are haunted characters guided by an invisible past they can't avoid.
*
Since I've seen The Banshees of Inisherin, I've been debating with myself whether it's slightly better or slightly worse than Todd Field's Tár, up to now my favourite for film-who-should-in-the-Oscar-but-won't. It's a very insular and, in many ways, modest viewing experience, but it packs an emotional punch like no other nominee. It's one of these movies that'll either speak to you on a profound level or not at all. I feel terrible giving another high score, but rules are rules: The Banshees of Inisherin made me emotional.
