Editor’s Note: After a few years working remotely, Nick Johnston is back in Canada all week covering the 2022 Toronto International Film Festival. We’re all very excited! Read through our continuing coverage of TIFF 2022, check out our official preview, and revisit our complete archives of this year and past festivals.
I don’t know if anyone really expected Martin McDonagh to take a five-year-break between films again after Three Billboards Outside of Ebbing, Missouri became 2017’s Oscar villain and unleashed a side of Frances McDormand that we’d never quite seen before once she took the stage to accept Best Actress (that was some intense shit!). But McDonagh always took some time between each of his films – it was four years before Seven Psychopaths coasted into cinemas based on the goodwill he’d earned from In Bruges, his still-unsurpassed debut in the world of cinema, and five between Psychopaths and Three Billboards – so it’s not exactly out of left field that he’d wait half a decade to return to cinemas. But, unlike the diminishing returns of his prior two films, his (and our) patience and preparation have paid off. McDonagh’s new film, The Banshees of Inishirin, is as close as he’s come to equaling the success of In Bruges, and it’s somewhat unsurprising, given that he’s reunited with the two leads whose on-screen friendship and chemistry made that one so memorable back in 2008.
This time, however, Colin Farrell and Brendan Gleeson aren’t best pals, strange hitmen in a strange land of precious houses and beautiful vistas. They’re a pair of Irishmen living on an island off the coast, which remains a peaceful oasis in the early ’20s even as the Irish Civil War rages across the mainland, with its cannon fire and blasts visible from across the bay to the residents of the island. The two couldn’t be more different, though they’ve always been somewhat close: Padraic (Farrell) is a genial if dull fellow who raises livestock with Sibohan (Kerry Condon), his educated sister who dreams of a job on the mainland and getting the fuck off the island, on their little plot of ancestral land. He loves getting drunk at the local pub, and his little donkey, who, indeed, is impossible not to love, it being one of the cutest animals to be glimpsed on screen in years (his little red bow and bell!). On the other side of the spectrum lies his friend, Colm (Gleeson), who is significantly more serious-minded in his pursuits. He lives alone with his little dog in a rocky stone hut, where he stokes his true passion, composing music for his fiddle, cognizant that the sands of time are starting to fill up on the wrong side of the hourglass. It’s because of this sense of mortal dread that, one day, Colm simply stops speaking to Padraic, refusing to acknowledge him during one of his regular invitations to down a few pints at the pub, and then continues the gambit while at the watering hole later that night. This, understandably, upsets the fuck out of Padraic, who drowns his sorrows with Dominic (Barry Keoghan, excellent as always), a local sex-obsessed miscreant who suffers at the hand of his father, the town’s policeman who starts taking a real dislike towards Padraic for how well he treats his kid (and for stealing his liquor).
What follows is a series of mishaps between the two former friends that eventually escalates far beyond its meager beginnings to the point that Colm offers Padraic an ultimatum: if he doesn’t stop talking to him, he’s gonna do something drastic to himself, and he’ll keep doing it every single time after that until he finally learns the lesson. But Padraic is a moron who is so good-hearted and hurt by this that he quite literally cannot help himself when it comes to trying to mend this broken bond, and Colm is a moron who is so focused on making something out of his life with the time he has left on this Earth that he’s committed enough to go through with his threats. What follows is essentially the immovable object meeting the unstoppable force, simply writ on to two Irish morons in the backcountry, who are vastly more alike than they are different yet cannot seem to find a reasonable compromise between the two of them, only with some added characteristic blood and grim irony. If that sounds somewhat familiar, and given the film’s setting, it should start setting off synapses, McDonagh never lets the allegory get in the way of his good time. Unlike his previous two films, Banshees maintains a consistent laconic vibe that can still easily accommodate his whip-smart and gut-busting dialogue, with the setting acting as both, specifically, beautiful window dressing and, more abstractly, a better instrument than, say, L.A. gruff or faux-Missourian grit. His understanding of the rhythms and cadence of Irish English is unparalleled in mainstream cinema, and hearing Farrell and Gleeson turn it over in their banter is, once again, a delight.
It’s kind of a bummer to think of this as a “return to form” for McDonagh, who has spent the better part of a decade trying to push his cinematic style further away from what he’s known for in his stage work, but I’d be lying to you if I said I wasn’t happy that he decided to do another project like Banshees, especially with the actors he’s chosen for the project. Farrell’s “second act,” whatever that entails, remains incredibly strong, with McDonagh’s influence on this period of his career only slowly starting to be eclipsed by, perhaps, Yorgos Lanthimos. He’s fantastic here, finding a similar core to the character he had In Bruges, but with the sarcasm and bitterness and world-weariness removed: all that remains is sort of a lacking depression, which he attempts to fill with some manner of pleasantness and friendship. The world-weary bitterness is, instead, shunted on to Gleeson, whose character isn’t so much defined by his happier days in his (relative) youth like in his character in Bruges, as much as it is the fact that he never really had any, to begin with, his life wasted in drunken conversations about what’s in Padaric’s donkey’s shit. What’s amusing is that both characters’ viewpoints are, in fact, easy to understand. However, the casual cruelty with which Colm regards his former friend is initially a little off-putting to see, but it’s mitigated by a scene in which, after being assaulted by Dominic’s father in the town square, Colm picks up Padraic and takes him home in his cart, not saying a word, only placing his arm around the stunned man. There’s a complex tenderness to both characters – yet not enough to keep it from still being amusing with body parts start getting cut off – one that I’m sure will continue to unfurl in subsequent viewings because, for the first time since 2008, McDonagh has made a film worth re-watching again and again.