The Banshees of Inisherin — I Just Don’t Like You No More

Four quiet words end a friendship, and McDonagh makes them loud enough to drown out a civil war.

Two o’clock. That is when Padraic Suilleabhain walks to Colm’s cottage, the way he has every day of his adult life, to collect his friend for the pub. Today the knock goes unanswered. Colm is right there through the window, smoking, not moving, and there is something obscene about it, a man visible and refusing to be reached. Later, at the pub, Padraic gets his explanation, and it lands with the flat finality of a doctor reading a chart: I just don’t like you no more. No affair. No betrayal. No wrong to apologize for or argue down. That is the whole inciting incident of The Banshees of Inisherin, and Martin McDonagh spends two hours proving it is enough to end the world.

He gives it a war for scale. Across the water, audible as occasional cannon fire, the Irish Civil War is burning through 1923. On Inisherin, two men are conducting their own, and the blackest joke in the film is that theirs is the one being fought over something real. Brothers shooting brothers on the mainland can at least name a cause. Padraic and Colm have only the truth, which is worse.

Colin Farrell gives the performance of his life here, and the role he gives it in is brutal: a man discovering, in public, at the pace of gossip, that he is boring. Padraic is kind, and kindness is his entire portfolio. He tends his animals. He is pleasant at two o’clock. He lets his miniature donkey Jenny into the house when it rains. Farrell plays the humiliation through his eyebrows, twin awnings of bewilderment collapsing by degrees, and through the terrible earnestness with which Padraic stands up in a pub and argues for his own worth. My ma was nice, he says, and no one remembers her, and no one remembers anyone. He is saying it to a man who wants only to write one piece of music before he dies. It is the film’s whole case for niceness against greatness, and the film has the nerve to give it to the losing side.

Brendan Gleeson plays Colm with the opposite instrument: stillness, a granite sadness the film is careful never to fully explain. Colm has looked at his remaining years, felt what the priest names as despair, and decided that Padraic’s chatter is the sound of his own life being spent. He is not wrong that time is short. He is monstrous about the arithmetic. The film holds both facts in its hands at once and never lets you put either one down, and its steadiness about not picking a villain is where its sadness comes from.

Then come the shears. Every further word from you, Colm announces, and I will cut off one of my own fiddling fingers. This is where McDonagh’s fable logic bares its teeth, and the film commits absolutely. The first finger arrives against the cottage door with a wet slap: a musician amputating his own future, note by note, to prove a rejection sincere. And Ben Davis shoots the aftermath the way he shoots everything on this island, in postcard light. Green hills. Holy glow. A severed finger in the road. That beauty is the film’s coldest tool. The wide shots keep setting these two tiny feuding men against cliffs and ocean that will outlast every grievance ever held on the island, while Carter Burwell’s score, all thin bells and lullaby threads, keeps a fairy-tale frame around what is, scene by scene, a grinding war between two kinds of loneliness.

The island around them is a chorus of what each man is afraid of becoming. Kerry Condon’s Siobhan, the only adult on Inisherin, gets the saddest arc in the picture: sharp enough to see the feud is idiocy, lonely enough that seeing it saves nobody, and finally brave enough to choose the mainland and a life over the island and its endless pint-time. And Barry Keoghan’s Dominic, the parish fool with a policeman father whose abuse the film hands us in one unbearable aside, is where I have to be honest about the movie’s reach. Keoghan is heartbreaking. But Dominic’s fate runs on folklore scheduling, the fool dying once his last hope is denied him, and it is the single place where the cruelty feels authored rather than inevitable, a fable collecting a death because that is what fables do. The old banshee woman on the road has practically filed the paperwork in advance. It works as myth. It is the one beat that does not work as life.

The ending restores the film to its terrible best. Jenny the donkey chokes on a fallen finger, and Padraic’s kindness dies with her. So the nice man burns the great man’s house down, politely, at a pre-announced hour, sparing the dog. Afterward the two of them stand on the beach in the wreckage of their war, and Colm offers the word truce. Padraic will not take it. Some things there’s no moving on from, he says, and that’s a good thing, I think. Across the water the cannons have gone quiet, and the last irony clicks shut. The national war will end; wars between armies do. The war between two men who once drank together at two o’clock has just found its permanent form.

McDonagh has made funnier films and bloodier ones. He has never made one this sad about so small a thing, or this certain that nothing is small on an island where everyone knows the sound of your knock.