It’s pretty rare for a first-time filmmaker to come straight out the gate with a genuine, bonafide masterpiece, but Martin McDonagh, formerly a renowned playwright and an Oscar-winning director of shorts, defied the odds and did so back in 2008 with In Bruges. A blisteringly funny neo-noir starring Colin Farrell and Brendan Gleeson as a pair of hitmen on pseudo-holiday in the Belgian city of the title, it’s genuinely fantastic and was a big film for us back in the halcyon days of the pre-recession Bush era. If you haven’t seen it, we highly recommend you do so at your earliest convenience — ain’t exactly like this shit is super obscure, and you’ve had twelve years to do so — and now you have an even better reason to do so.
According to Deadline, McDonagh’s re-teaming with his In Bruges leads for a wild-sounding new project. It’s reportedly called The Banshees at Inisheer, but there seems to be some dispute around that title. We’ll just call Farrell and Gleeson a couple of banshees at Inisheer and relay that the film is looking to begin shooting this summer.
Here’s what Deadline had to say about the film’s plot (and believe us, it is not very much):
“The film is set on a remote Irish isle, and they will play two lifelong friends who find themselves at an impasse when one abruptly ends their relationship with alarming consequences for both of them.”
It sounds like a return-to-roots project for the director, who departed Europe in order to tell America-set stories with Seven Psychopaths (yay!) and Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri (nay!). We’re especially excited to see McDonagh work with both Gleeson and Farrell again, a fruitful partnership if there ever was one, and we can only hope that this adds to the burgeoning genre of “two nutcases drive each other crazy in a small locale,” much like The Lighthouse did this past year.
There’s no word as to when these two banshees at Inisheer (*ahem) will release just yet, but we expect that to follow soon after, you know, the cameras start rolling.