Film review: Gleeson and Farrell are terrific as embattled friends in The Banshees of Inisherin 

The Banshees of Inisherin sees Brendan Gleeson and Colin Farrell reunited for the first time since In Bruges

★★★★☆

No man is an island, and especially when he lives on an island so small that it’s impossible to escape from the stultifying conversation of his best friend. 

“I just don’t like you anymore,” Colm (Brendan Gleeson) tells Pádraic (Colin Farrell) as The Banshees of Inisherin (16s) begins. The problem is that Colm is a musical man with one eye on his life’s legacy, and Pádraic is ‘a limited man’ whose inane conversation is distracting Colm from composing on his fiddle. 

Unwilling to believe Colm is truly serious, and concerned that his friend is suffering from depression, Pádraic refuses to leave Colm alone – which is when matters begin to escalate rather quickly. 

Set during the Irish Civil War, The Banshees of Inisherin could very easily have descended into knockabout paddywhackery. 

But while at first glance the film looks like a John Hinde postcard, complete with thatched cottages, drystone walls and miniature donkeys roaming about indoors, writer-director Martin McDonagh gets the aesthetic spot-on – Colm and Pádraic inhabit a rural Irish outpost that seems idyllic until we duck under the cottages’ low roofs into the claustrophobic world of lonely bachelors and spinsters, and tediously repetitive conversations, and the inescapable monotony of an enclosed world with very few prospects. 

Colin Farrell and Barry Keoghan 

Best pals in real life, and reunited for the first time since McDonagh’s In Bruges (2008), Gleeson and Farrell are terrific here as the embattled friends, with Farrell in especially good form as the betrayed and baffled Pádraic who – despite everything – insists on the importance of people being nice. 

There’s excellent support too from Kerry Condon as Pádraic’s sister Siobhan, and Barry Keoghan as the island simpleton Dominic, who is ‘against wars and soap’. 

A smart blend of JM Synge and Samuel Beckett, with its apparently innocuous feud (and backdrop of civil war) hinting at something much darker and primeval than a spat between friends, The Banshees of Inisherin is as thought-provoking as it is laugh-out-loud. 

(cinema release)