The Banshees of Insherin

In The Banshees of Insherin writer/director Martin McDonagh creates a devastating portrait of a civil war where nearly all the most vicious wounds are created when the characters are cruel to each other.

The movie begins when Colm (Brendan Gleeson) tells Padriac (Colin Farrell) that he doesn’t want to be friends anymore. Padriac lives with his sister and is clearly a little slow. He has a friend named Dominic (Barry Keoghan) who is a little slower than he is. And his sister Siobhan (Kerry Condon) is a woman of grace and intelligence but is perhaps, too emotionally slow, to realize quickly enough how badly the war with Padriac and Colm will end.

To our graves we’re taking this. To one of our graves, anyways.

Pádraic Súilleabháin

Colm and Padriac are drinking buddies on a little island on the coast of Ireland in 1923. Their country is in the midst of a civil war. They are so close they can hear the shooting sometimes and the explosions. But there is no battle scene in this movie, except for the battle going on in the hearts of the men at war with each other.

Padriac is hurt by Colm but also selfish and unwilling to believe his longtime friend is really serious about his wish to end their relationship. That Colm is deadly serious — and the extremes to which he goes to make his point clear — drives the movie and its characters to their end.

McDonagh began as a playwright and he builds a castle here, line by line, brick by brick, that he then pays off in the second half of the film. The whole enterprise becomes thrilling when all the choices and consequences and throwaway lines in the first half of the movie began firing at the viewer during the second half.

Look at this I found. A stick with a hook. What would you use it for, I wonder. To hook things that are the length of a stick away?

Dominic Kearney

It’s like a boomerang, things went flying past the audience in the first part and then they come home, lit afire, and nail down the movie’s themes and motives.

One of the wonders of Banshees is that while there is shocking violence in it it’s never as powerful as the language. There is a moment where one character tells another he will burn his house down. And that conversation, that turn, is harsher than what actually happens next.

You used to be nice. Or did you never used to be? Oh, God. Maybe you never used to be.

Pádraic Súilleabháin

The movie doesn’t include a ton of subplots, nor does it need them, but a fumbling attempt at love by Dominic just absolutely broke my heart. Some of us get to have love and families and the lives we wanted or chose. But for many people, those things are just out of reach and usually through no fault of their own. They have their dreams and that’s all they will ever be, just dreams.

All of this feels Shakespearean and there seems to be dark magic just at the edge of the characters’ lives. There is an old woman in this and she seems to just sort of appear out of the mist from time to time. She reminded me of one of the three weird sisters in the Scottish play.

Pádraic hides from her behind the stone fences when he sees her coming. Two other characters call her a ghoul. At one point she announces that death is coming. Then she adds that it could be two deaths.

Then later she leads a man to a body. Why she chose that man, to recover that body, is deeply telling.

The Banshees of Insherin is dark, cruel, funny, and ice cold. I’m convinced it’s the best movie of 2022.