The Banshees of Inisherin

Delight.... Despair....

I’ve watched the film The Banshees of Inisherin three times. The first time, I expected a light comedy, because that seemed to me how the movie began. I had a smile on my face for a good part of the first thirty minutes. There was much clever badinage between two Irish actors expert at the craft of playful, humorous talk. But those expectations eventually were eroded by the contentiousness of the two characters, played with their usual great skill by Brendan Gleeson as the gruff, angry Colm and, especially, Colin Farrell as the shy, dull Pádraig. (Note: if you have not seen In Bruges, with both these actors, and Colin Farrell’s heartrending performance in the Irish film Ondine, I suggest you reserve an evening or two…soon!...and watch those films. In The Banshees of Inisherin, Colin Farrell especially makes a “dull” personality seem emotionally profound and deeply interesting.)

Here comes a plot spoiler: As the relationship between the two men falls apart, Colm, who is an accomplished fiddle player in the local pub, begins cutting off the fingers of his left hand. It is a kind of retribution he is offering for Pádraig’s having so dull a personality. This is an amazingly shocking moment and, I thought, a complete derailing of what had been a worthwhile light comedy. It seemed to me a foolish effort on the part of the film’s makers to engage our terrified emotions. Great physical pain suddenly takes center stage, and that turns the film so dark that right away I felt betrayed by it. Was this some kind of despair? No, it was a trick, I thought. Isn’t this is a comedy? I decided that the scriptwriter and director (both being the same Martin McDonagh) had strayed way off the path, and that the film was running disastrously wrong. Although I watched it until the very end, I felt led astray. Or maybe I was in the clutches simply of a failed storyteller who didn’t know what to do and how to resolve things. I had expected the two men to make up and rejoin each other in the pub, myself breathing easily with their passage back to friendship and good humor.

But that doesn’t happen.  Indeed, it doesn’t happen big time!

For the next several days, I wondered how the film had ever gotten made, much less green-lighted. But I continued thinking about it, despite myself, mostly because of the performances of Farrell and Gleeson, as well as that of the luminous Kerry Condon as Pádraig’s sister Siobhan and Barry Keoghan as the town dunce Dominic.

How had these talents, so obvious on screen, come to be so wasted?

A few elements remained in my worries, though. The action takes place on a small Atlantic island (Inisherin) that has perhaps a few hundred citizens. It is rural, isolated, with an uneducated population that is beset by rigid Catholicism. The film takes place during the Irish Civil War of the 1920s, an event that would bother almost anyone’s mind. Faraway rifle and cannon fire are sometimes heard wandering across the strait from the Irish mainland. The one place of entertainment and talk on Inisherin is the pub, where Colm and Pádraig have been meeting almost every day at two PM for years. Nothing much has ever happened on Inisherin, and the circular small talk among the men in the pub is almost always some version of the same…entertaining, humorous, and vacant.

And then comes the matter of Colm’s sacrificing his fingers to what has become his boredom with Pádraig’s dullness. That’s the only thing he explains to Pádraig. “You’re dull.” With that, he begins slicing his left hand into pieces (the hand that so determines the music from his beloved fiddle) and placing the fingers on the pathway around Pádraig and Siobhan’s isolated house.

It is monstrous.

But , yes, the movie continued beckoning toward me. “Come back. Pay attention!” it said. I simply could not understand Colm’s sudden descent into dismissal of his longtime pal just because Pádraig was dull. Nor could I understand the reasons for Colm’s sudden self-mutilation. Thus, against my better judgment, I watched the film a second time. (I confess that it’s anointment by the Academy Awards was an element in that decision. Those awards often get things quite wrong. But this was, in my mind, an extreme case, and I had to find what they possibly could ever have seen in this film.)

To my astonishment, in this second viewing, I figured it out. Then, I looked at it a third time, just to be sure that I was right in my new assessment, that what I was watching may possibly be one of the great films about the human heart that’s ever been made.

The secret to the film is first suggested by one word in its title. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, a banshee is “a supernatural being supposed by the peasantry of Ireland and the Scottish Highlands to wail under the windows of a house where one of the inmates is about to die.” I hadn’t thought to look up the definition until the second time I saw the film, because I couldn’t figure out why the old woman in the film (Mrs. McCormick, played by Irish actress Sheila Flitton), who is possibly the banshee or feels herself to be so, was even there. Wasn’t this shrewish old lady’s smoking a pipe and suggesting worry and death a little outside the territory of the humorous, conflicted back-and-forth between Colm and Pádraig? She was bringing the entire comedy down with each frightening appearance on a rural pathway, with each draw on her pipe. Or was she a truth teller? “I do not hide behind walls,” she says once upon discovering Pádraig doing just that in order to avoid her.

There are clues about deep despair everywhere in the film, although often passing by so quickly that it is easy to miss them. The very opening scene shows Colm sitting alone in his isolated house, silent, smoking, and unhappy. In Siobhan’s first conversation with her brother Pádraig, we see his own sense of depression. In his case, though, there’s a reason for it right away, with Colm’s rejection of his friendship after so many years, without an explanation other than that “You’re dull, Pádraig.”

There are individual bits of dialog that reveal Colm’s much deeper sadness. “I have this tremendous sense of time slippin’ away on me, Pádraig.” Or “In twelve years, I’ll die with nothin’ to show for it.” On the subject of chat: “None of it helps me.” In the first scene with Colm in Confession with the visiting priest, who comes to the island only occasionally, the priest’s initial question is, “How’s the despair, Colm?” Colm responds, “I’m not goin’ to do anything about it, no.” In one moment, a very resigned Colm says, “I do worry about meself, that I may be stavin’ off the inevitable.” And, in a confrontation with Siobhan, Colm says “All I want is a bit of peace in me heart.” As mentioned, Colm is an accomplished fiddle player. In a scene after he has cut off his first finger (a thumb, the other four still remaining), he is sitting alone practicing a sequence he has composed for his fiddle. It may be that my own interpretation of this bit of music is off the mark. But I found it to be discordant, angry, and, worst of all, unsatisfactory to Colm himself.

And…late in the film, during a conversation with her brother Pádraig about why she has decided to leave Inisherin…in the company, she hopes, of Pádraig himself… Siobhan tells him, “There’s nothin for you on Inisherin. Nothin’ but more blankness and grudges and loneliness and spite and the slow passin’ of time and death.”

Within such a setting, it comes as no surprise that some characters would suffer from deep personal despair and depression…and those are what this film is finally about. Great despair without an out. Silent isolation and depression. The subtlety and, may I say, the sensitivity and sometime humor with which this truth is displayed in the script and especially by the actors is something I have rarely seen in films. Colm’s difficulties are real. Pádraig’s suffering and misguided wishes for retribution (as shown by his setting Colm’s house on fire and watching it burn) are real. With this second viewing, I believed everything the actors were doing, including the disappearance of Colm’s fingers. His cutting them off is the beginning of an effort to erase himself. My third viewing of the film confirmed what I now could see clearly. Brendan Gleeson’s portrayal of life-threatening despair is real. I have long been a fan of Colin Farrell’s silences and moments of isolation in several roles. He shows these with special finesse in this film…even when he is burning down the house of his longtime friend.

The Banshees of Inisherin is largely a story of the unavoidable falling away of heart. Mrs. McCormick may herself be some sort of banshee. But it is despair and the soul’s isolated failure that are the real banshees. Told with such clarity, the film’s banshees nonetheless may not be readily apparent on first viewing. But they are there. They are what this fine film is about.

© Copyright 2023. Terence Clarke. All rights reserved.

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