In the Flesh: The Banshees of Inisherin

On an island just off the coast of embattled Ireland, in the year 1923, Colm Doherty (Brendan Gleeson) decides to end his friendship with Pádraic Súilleabháin (Colin Farrell). A blackly tragicomic series of events ensues as Pádraic struggles to accept the loss of his best friend, who wishes to spend his old age pursuing legacy and contribution to the arts through his fiddle-playing and composing rather than passing the time with idle chatter. The tension between legacy and daily life animates much of the film, with the Irish Revolution serving as a thematically connected backdrop for their interpersonal struggle. Director Martin McDonagh does an enjoyable enough job laying out the complexities of changing feelings in adult friendships: priorities diverging, maturation and stagnation, resentment building over time. It’s worthy material, but the real story is in what the two men overlook while in conflict.

Barry Keoghan in the role of maladjusted young man Dominic, the only son of brutal local constable Peadar Kearney (Gary Lydon), is the emotional key to Banshees, suffering terribly in full view of his community and disregarded by nearly all of it. Pádraic blithely calls him the stupidest man on the island while depressed over Colm calling him dull, reproducing the same painful judgment causing him so much pain. Pádraic’s sister Siobhán likewise treats Dominic harshly at first, and even the revelation that Dominic’s abusive father’s cruelty extends to sexual violation occasions nothing more than an uncomfortable silence when Pádraic yells it in the middle of the local tavern. If the Revolution is a grand echo of Pádraic and Colm’s conflict, the tragedy of Dominic’s life and suicide is a faint and quiet one.

Colm’s belief that history and posterity matter more than life and Pádraic’s rejoinder that kindness in the here and now means more than legacy are both a false dichotomy and disconnected from reality. Neither man is really part of the world, ignoring the loss of loved ones and the pain of strangers in favor of petty grudges and unreasonable ultimatums. McDonagh frames it all with uneven visual charm ranging from the bleakly pastoral to the slightly saccharine, and he often lingers too close to his subjects, cramping his framing and chopping up the natural beauty of his island setting. The Banshees of Inisherin is admirably subtle, but visually it never quite coheres.