114 min | R | October 21, 2022 | Searchlight Pictures
On a remote Irish island in 1923, one man decides he is finished with his best friend. There is no fight and no betrayal, just a verdict that the friendship is over. Colin Farrell and Brendan Gleeson turn a petty falling-out into a small apocalypse.
The Banshees of Inisherin sets two old friends against each other on a small Irish island in 1923. Colm Doherty tells Pádraic Súilleabháin that he no longer wants to speak to him. He offers no insult and no quarrel. He has simply decided that Pádraic bores him and that the friendship is finished. The film studies the cruelty of being discarded by someone you love and the way a man unravels when his small world rejects him. The mainland civil war rumbles across the water while a smaller war plays out between two men who used to drink together every afternoon.
Colin Farrell plays Pádraic as a kind and simple man who cannot understand why kindness is no longer enough. He keeps his face open and wounded and lets the hurt curdle into something harder. Brendan Gleeson plays Colm with the weariness of a man chasing meaning before he dies. He wants to write music and be remembered, and he treats friendship as a thing he can no longer afford. Kerry Condon plays Siobhán, Pádraic’s sister, as the only person on the island who sees the trap clearly. Barry Keoghan plays Dominic Kearney, the town outcast, with a raw need for connection that the film treats with real tenderness.
Martin McDonagh writes and directs with the precision of a man who built the same tensions on the stage. The camera holds the green hills and gray sea in wide static frames that make the human cruelty look tiny against the land. Doorways and windows box the characters in throughout, separating Colm and Pádraic even when they share a room. The fiddle music carries the loneliness that the men refuse to speak aloud. McDonagh paces the escalation with dread, letting each small refusal harden into something that cannot be taken back.
This is a film about the violence that lives inside ordinary loneliness. Colm wants his life to mean something and decides that Pádraic stands in the way. Pádraic wants only to be liked and discovers that being nice protects no one. McDonagh refuses to soften either man or to pretend the rupture can heal. He sets a friendship on fire and watches it burn down to the thing that was always underneath.