‘The Banshees of Inisherin’ review: Brendan Gleeson and Colin Farrell fight a personal Irish Civil War in Martin McDonagh’s green and black comedy [B+] | Venice Film Festival

Pádraic (Colin Farrell) is a happy-go-lucky guy. He walks fictional Irish island Inisherin, in April 1923, as if he gets on with everyone, and convinces himself that he does. That includes malevolent police officer Kearney (Gary Lyden), who snubs him at every turn, probably for the better. When Pádraic notices fighting between British-backed Free State forces and the separatist IRA as part of Ireland’s yearlong Civil War, he mutters to himself with full sincerity: “I hope whatever they’re fighting for, they get.”

Innocent souls unable to understand why someone might be cruel to them are often the ones who get hurt the most, largely because they’re less likely to have hurt people themselves. Like Brendan Fraser’s specimen perfect Charlie in The Whale, Pádraic seems like the kind of person who couldn’t hurt a fly. So when longtime best friend Colm (Brendan Gleeson) decides he never wants to see, talk to or hear from Pádraic again, this causes quite the bafflement. “You haven’t been rowin’, have ya?”, half the town seems to ask. “I don’t think we’ve been rowin,”  Pádraic replies to each of them.

McDonagh’s script is, unsurprisingly, chock-full of these sorts of repetitions and witticisms. A scene in which Colm is accosted by his priest, upon Pádraic’s request, is a particular highlight. But as McDonagh films go, The Banshees of Inisherin is remarkably temperate. It lacks — intentionally — the sharp bite of In Bruges or the moralisms of Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri. In Banshees, McDonagh seems to accept not having the answers. That makes for fewer snappy scenes than we’ve become accustomed to. Conversations go unfinished, dilemmas unsolved. Pádraic’s sister Siabhon (Kerry Condon), in particular, is one of McDonagh’s cleverer and more sensitive characters. Her thoughtfulness doesn’t lend itself to the kind of macho bickering for which McDonagh made his name.

Another McDonagh did forge a career this way, however: Martin’s older brother John Michael, whose 2014 film Calvary, also starring Brendan Gleeson, has left a clear mark on The Banshees of Inisherin. Although set ninety years later, Calvary paints a similar picture of provincial Ireland as a tiny town where everyone knows each other, and where grudges last. The hokeyness masking a darker underbelly in Inisherin also appears influenced by John Ford’s The Quiet Man, in which the innocence of rural Ireland is contrasted with an ex-boxer’s Chicago past, and then subverted. Dominic Kearney (Barry Keoghan), Inisherin’s resident “gom” (idiot), could be a character in either of those films. Keoghan’s livewire performance is among the best parts of Banshees. It is becoming the case that his acting is often a highlight in whatever he’s in.

Even with Keoghan’s apparent lighter touch, Martin McDonagh’s latest is a more soulful and straightforwardly sad film than we’ve seen from him before. Pádraic, Colm and the others are given the time and space to feel things, rather than throw witty retorts at each other to get themselves out of trouble. What’s underpinning their seemingly irreconcilable differences is the sad truth that Inisherin is the middle of nowhere. It is not the site for exciting, nor notable things. The war, and reading, take place across the water. Some in Ireland consider emigration a kind of rite of passage, but that isn’t an option for McDonagh’s characters, who must like it and lump it. That makes this tiny made up place at a time of great turmoil quite the pressure cooker for personal feuds and fallings out. It also makes for another successful, even darker comedy from McDonagh.

Grade: B+

This review is from the 2022 Venice Film Festival. Searchlight Pictures will release The Banshees of Inisherin only in theaters on October 21.