Can a horse replace your best friend? Colin Farrell as the unsuspecting dairy farmer Pádraic who no longer understands the world.
Image: Disney
Oscar-worthy: The feature film “The Banshees of Inisherin” with Colin Farrell and Brendan Gleeson is a raven-black comedy from Ireland – and great acting cinema.
What is more important in life: being smart or being kind? To be loved or great? lucky or spirit? These are the central questions in Martin McDonagh’s new film “The Banshees by Inisherin”, which oscillates between tragedy and comedy and works through its theme like a Bach fugue with a lot of Irish wit and bitter irony down to the smallest variations. Fourteen years after his film debut, See Bruges…And Die, the Anglo-Irish filmmaker has teamed up again with actors Colin Farrell and Brendan Gleeson, albeit to tell something completely different this time: no suspense-driven hitman plot. Rather, The Banshees of Inisherin is an epic allegory of the state of Ireland.
Set in the 1920s on the fictional island of Inisherin, the story centers on the quarrels of two men who have been as close as brothers throughout their lives and who drank Guinness and sang songs together in the pub every day, until one day one fell into the other the friendship ended, abruptly, without explanation and for no apparent reason. This is funny at first and soon becomes tragic, because the unfounded argument has consequences not only for those affected. Because while the civil war over there on the big island of Ireland is at best being blown over to the small island by the occasional gunshot, every islander, whether voluntarily or not, is involved in the private small-scale war.
