The Banshees of Inisherin

  In playwright Martin McDonagh’s new film the context defines the plot. A few scenes of remote gunfire connote the Irish Civil War in 1923. The Western island setting is remote from the war, with only that occasional aural connection. Yet the village drama is a miniature of the civil strife that erupted after Ireland won its independence. The mainland war replays here as a conflict between two friends. 

The folk musician Colm is suffering from despair. Sensing his imminent mortality he composes a folk tune to provide some afterlife. Exposing that futility, the song’s (as the film’s) title just sounds good. It has no reality. There are no banshees there.

More damaging is Colm’s other resolve. to cease wasting time on his longtime close friend Padraic, who is a standard dumb bloke. But as Padraic’s bookish sister Siobhan reminds Colm, all the men on that remote isolated crag are dumb — or they would long since have left. As she eventually does. 

Like the civil war, indeed like most wars, that small difference swells into a tangle of destruction, both mutual and self. When Padraic refuses his old friend’s insistence upon being left alone, Colm chops off one of his own fingers for each day of offence. He is quickly reduced to one fingerless hand. That ends his fiddling pleasure, leaving him to stab his fiddle into the air in mute musicianship. Once he is unable to play his tune it won’t outlive him.

When Padriac’s donkey Minnie (persuasively performed by Minnie) fatally chokes on some fingers, his injured innocence turns mortal. Rejecting Colm’s apology and offer of peace, he burns his former friend’s home to the ground. Even then he refuses to make peace. They won’t be “quits” until Colm dies. “Some things there's no moving on from. And I think that's a good thing.” On such stubborn squabbles are most wars waged.

The apparently homey little community is rife with aggression. Humorously, Colm disdains of the law: “If punching a policeman is a sin then we may as well pack up and go home.” The priest who hears his confession himself erupts into indignant violent profanity. He reads the Latin but speaks the vulgate. In another family, the father mercilessly beats his wife and son, who drowns himself when Siobhan confirms his expectation that she would never fall in love with the much younger and irritating boy.

At the end Padraic, having supposedly won his satisfaction, is left alone. His sister gone, he brings his cows and horse into his house. This is his finally stable relationship. Colm is left with far more isolation than he requested. Indeed the entire community is left — as Colm admits to and suspects Siobhan of sharing — just “entertaining myself while staving off the inevitable.”

There is a true serenity and beauty in the island’s bleak landscape. And even in this doomed community, a warmth and pathos emerge from the small, tense lives of paralysis and despair. 

And note this: if a calendar turning up April Fool’s  Day did not establish the 1923 setting there is nothing in this film’s setting, speech and themes that could not represent today. If we don’t see ourselves there we’re the April Fool.