The Banshees of Inisherin

The Banshees of Inisherin

Two lifelong friends find themselves at an impasse when one abruptly ends their relationship, with alarming consequences for both of them.

  • Released:
  • Runtime: 114 minutes
  • Genre: Comedy, Drama
  • Stars: Brendan Gleeson, Kerry Condon, Barry Keoghan, Pat Shortt, Gary Lydon, Sheila Flitton, Jon Kenny, David Pearse, Bríd Ní Neachtain
  • Director: Martin McDonagh
 Comments
  • shivangfzd - 3 June 2024
    Giving Your Friend your Finger everytime he tries to talk to you.
    Martin Mcdonagh directs another brilliant dark comedy after "Three Billboards, Outside Ebbing, Missouri", A tale about Friendship, Ambition and Loneliness. Every scene has a serene visual which pleases the eye sight plus incredible acting.

    Main Cast - Padraic (Colin Farrell), a sociable cow herder, and Colm (Brendan Gleeson), a melancholy fiddler. Genre - Dark Tragic Comedy, Drama.

    Colm and Padraic are two friends who have a falling out because Colm simply doesn't want to be friends with the other anymore. Why? Answer is very hilarious because Colm suddenly thinks that Padraic is too dull. Padraic is devastated and refuses to accept the situation, while Colm only becomes more resistant to his old friend's attempts to make amends, eventually giving Padraic an ultimatum: every time Padraic talks to him, Colm will cut off one of his own fingers. And from here drama gets more tragically towards dark comedy. I would like to aware you if you are going to see this movie and you are emotionally fragile, that it does tap into the dark side of your brain and leaves you in deep thought when it is finished. So leave your brain(emotional and logical part) at side and watch it with wit and humour.

    And remember Some creatures are marked out for tragedy - In the Irish culture, a banshee is a fairy, sometimes represented as an old woman that announces the death of someone close.
  • leroyatone - 23 March 2024
    This is not a story to make you want to visit Ireland.
    This is not a story that would make you want to visit Ireland.

    On the mainland, there is civil war; the gunfire can be heard from the island.

    On the island, there is violent oppression by the police, despair, a repressive church, superstitions, isolation, and poverty. The islanders are not kind to each other.

    Pádraic ó Súilleabháin (Colin Farrell) is a nice man, if dull, who struggles with losing his friendship with Colm Doherty (Brendan Gleeson) who is looking death in the face and cares little about himself. Despair is rife on the Island. It sure is a depressing place. Why would anyone want to stay? Siobhán ní Súilleabháin his sister ( Kerry Condon) has some good sense and leaves for the mainland.

    It's not perfect and lets you down in a few areas. The setting was too squeaky clean; new clean clothes, good straight teeth, no bare feet. The poverty of the time could have been showcased a bit more.
  • arthurpvandenbergh - 7 February 2024
    A powerful moving film
    This is not the film for those who want a bit of light hearted fun and an easy watch - but if you put yourself into the right frame of mind it is absolutely brilliant. A poignant commentary on human nature, even seeming to me partly Shakespearean in essence, although, like Shakespeare, requires a lot of reading between the lines. The acting is brilliant, across the board, with the lead being particularly marvellously played. The film is very Irish - if you don't know what I mean watch it and you'll understand - the landscapes are rough and raw, but also beautiful, all in all it's definitely well worth a watch.
  • JimMcCranie - 12 January 2023
    I don't get it
    This movie is just not for me. Also, I'm not sure how there are so many reviews rating it so highly? I get there are people who like the twisted and dark type of movies like this but seems unusually high. Did I watch the right movie? To sum it up, It was very slow to start and didn't really seem to pick up in interest throughout the rest of the movie. I did not find it entertaining in any way the the overall plot of the movie was, how should I put it, extremely odd. The actors did a very good job, I would have given the movie one star had the acting not been as good as it was. There aren't many movies I rate so poorly but this one fit the bill.
  • rexi-77764 - 11 January 2023
    Totally overrated
    The hype around this film is completely incomprehensible to me. Yes, the actor performances are very good but the storyline does not make sense. It's neither funny nor sad nor does it give something to reflect about. I still had hope in the first part but it got so weird in the second one that I was thinking for the first time in my life about leaving a movie before its end. The only emotion I felt at the end was frustration about having wasted money.

    One star is for the actors and actresses performances and scenery of Ireland. As for the rest, guys, save your money and spent it for a better investment.
  • mformoviesandmore - 9 January 2023
    No subtlety.
    A movie for viewers who need to be hit over the head with direct pointers to social issues, and where setting the movie in a remote location passes for profundity.

    The two leads clod-hop through the weak script like they are doing an Abbott and Costello performance. Cliches abound and the story plods along telegraphing each coming scene.

    The setting is picturesque - but it is even when a film crew is not there, so the movie isn't adding to but rather is just stealing from the natural beauty.

    One Hundred and two more letter are required to make this available. It seems that more effort is required than for the script. But the film didn't need more words, just better ones.
  • tonyro-52896 - 7 January 2023
    Enchanting
    What a lovely enchanting movie. Colin Farrell is a revelation. Barry Keoghan is a joy. I can always watch Brendan Gleeson. He always delivers. Wonderful Irish cast. It makes a joyous change to hear them speak naturally too. It's a very simple story brought to life by a tremendous ensemble.

    I enjoyed the innocence of an Ireland in times gone by. However for me the natural beauty of the wild Atlantic way is the show stopper. The beauty of Ireland is breathtaking.

    I have to say that the lack of traditional Irish music for me is the biggest let down though. I know this was intentional but I don't understand why.
  • Semisonic - 6 January 2023
    Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair
    It's ironic that, when I was younger and knew nothing, I used to imagine Ireland as this merry land of jolly folk songs and people peacefully getting drunk on ale just to sing and dance to those songs, and maybe to write a few more.

    It's equally ironic to recall how this naive image was shattered. Not through learning the history of English occupation. Not even through learning about The Great Hunger. It was through observing images of those patchwork fields on the slopes near the shore. With nothing but grass around, not a single tree. And those stone hedges that weren't even meant to demark land owned by different people, but rather to protect this already almost barren stony land from eroding even further and just leaking and blowing into the ocean. It was the epitome of hopelessness and some kind of quiet realisation, that there's no solution here, and this is how things will remain. With no promise of any happy ending, or happy beginning or being for that matter.

    Those fields. It was enough to have a single look to feel this anguish. Stuff that makes village people drink themselves to death or find quicker ways of reaching the same bitter end.

    The Banshees of Inisherin manages to do what I didn't think was possible. It amplifies this feeling, makes it take shape, almost turns it into something palpable, and delivers it right into your core so that you shiver even if you're thousands of miles away from those bare windy shores. And it does all that through another unparalleled trick. The vessel that carries this heavy spirit is not some huge riveting conflict. But rather its polar opposite. The most minuscule thing imaginable. A story of one man becoming boring for another one.

    We are so used to attaching strong emotions to strong stimulation that at first this film feels deafeningly underwhelming. It is so silently uneventful that you might decide that you just lost your hearing. Yet it's through this eerie quiet that we start hearing things that we didn't even know existed. What once looked dull and bleak now turns into a cacophony so loud that one would literally need to distract themselves with pain to stop hearing it.

    It's not a problem when your friend is dull if you are surrounded with shiny bright sources of cheap stimulation, like all of us are in this modern ever-connected world. But what if your whole universe contracts to a small patch of land with a small group of people on it, desperate for novelty but so used to that desperation that suppressing it becomes a national character? How do you convince yourself that you're still alive, and, even if you are, that your life has any essence and value at all?

    With only what the life of a small Irish settlement could provide, Martin McDonagh creates something that's at the same time a Boschian pandemonium and a frozen circle of Dantean hell. Where everything moves and talks and bleats at once, but nothing really happens and nothing really matters. In a way, your only hope at sanity is your own blindness and deafness. But once you un-dull yourself, existence becomes a race against time and things that don't push you forward pull you down instead.

    All this ambiguous and quite nutty complexity is tough to coherently put into words. But the power quartet of Colin Farell, Brendan Gleeson, Kerry Condon and Barry Keoghan make this almost religious revelation entirely visceral. Through those quite simplistic facial movements these people let us in on the horrors of being trapped inside the routine, feeling brutally lonely while among people, and just suffocating with the mundane and the transient. You could feel it so close that the shattering experience of watching TBoI isn't even in its gory moments (although those are awfully disturbing), but in the despair of sitting next to a person you hold dear - yet knowing that there's a wall between you that can't be overcome, and just crying helplessly.

    I'm not sure of the film offers any sensible amount of hope at the end. Can redemption be achieved simply via suffering? Does a symbolic sacrifice of one life breathe in life into someone else, so robotic and predictable that they could just as well be dead? And if it does, is there a single chance of this newly found life to have a semblance of, if not meaning then at least value? There's no way to know that. Because, sated with this ritual suffering, banshees are silent now, they sit back, amused, and observe. And all we can do is follow suit.
  • Joe_Means - 5 January 2023
    Pass me the bucket
    Absolute dumpster fire of a movie. Trash. Faux 'arthouse' made by people with too much money and too much self interest, with actors on too high a wage and too much self interest. Amateur editing cuts, almost broadsword-esque at times with cutting between characters dialogue back & forth robotically, random cuts to an unnecessary close up of a face for 2 seconds then over to another unnecessary shot that brings no premise nor sculpture of context then back to the 3rd or maybe 4th shot choice shown in the scene in totally maybe 10 cuts for a scene lasting no longer than 1 minute, no camera air time to let any scene really marinate, bleh. And was this supposed to be a comedy? Tragic comedy of errors more like. Oh wait! Of course, of course! It makes sense, I should have known... When you have Collin Farell as your lead, a man who's acting could be mistaken for a cardboard sign outside a budget saver store, there is generally only one way the whole vibe of a movie is going to hang it's coating over, that of a self indulgent narcissist who's just vomited over himself and wants you to admire him and tell him how lovely his new coat is, and also give him money for it, because clearly he's so amazing and basically a auteur, with his vomit dripping down from his chin, onto your shoe.

    Filming an empty bucket for one hour & fifty three minutes with the last minute having someone throwing up in the bucket would be more interesting and artistically stimulating than this film.
  • llpugpug - 4 January 2023
    Heart wrenching and tragic. Brilliant
    I watched this film cold after not having read anything about it, and I have to say it's beautifully acted and I loved the depth of the characters.

    I went through all the emotions watching the characters go on a downward spiral on just one decision, laughter, anger, despair and upset. To watch that one decision pull apart the fabric of community and friendship was heart wrenching, all set in a stark and bleak but beautiful backdrop of West Coast Ireland. For me personally, I love observing human nature and people, and this film documents how far people can be pushed before they snap.

    I'm going to think about this film for a long time, tragic and brilliant.