Banshees of Inisherin an Ode to Loneliness

Playwright Martin McDonagh writes with a knife to a rock, etching in truths that are hard for his characters to swallow.

“I just don’t like you no more,” Colm Doherty tells his long-time friend and drinking buddy, Pádraic Súilleabháin.

It is the stuff of absurd finality that one either laughs off as “only the Irish” or cowers in wretched self-consciousness. The result is both touching and sorrowful.

Banshees of Inisherin is this year’s The Lighthouse (2019), except the kerosene concoctions are replaced with pints of stout, and the animals are treated like companions. 

“I’m not putting my donkey outside when I’m sad,” says Pádraic. 

You see, beneath McDonagh’s blaring prose of manliness is a soft cry of loneliness, and God-fearing Irishmen of the 1920s don’t talk about their feelings, especially when they’re stuck on an island.

McDonagh’s duo is cast to perfection: Brendan Gleeson manifests Colm with a hardened face, weathered by the coastline and the hundreds of “dull” conversations he’s had to endure with Pádraic, a character made for the dough-eyed baby face of Colin Farrell.

The actors dwell in their character’s mire within tiny stone homes while Carter Burwell’s pensive score refuses to resolve. Like Robert Eggers’s The Lighthouse, there are plenty of shots of the ocean waters and their promises of a brighter future. But, these men choose to wallow in loneliness as either a virtue or a curse.

Colm’s abrupt announcement to end his friendship with Pád is like Melville’s “Bartleby, The Scrivener,” in which a failure of connection exhausts itself to conclusiveness: “I would prefer not to.”

“Let’s just call it quits,” says Colm.

The miracle in Martin McDonagh’s written, directed, and produced film is found in its sporadically dark humor, echoing the shock and awkwardness of Fargo (1996).

They say love is a choice. So is loneliness.

It’s kind of funny.

****1/2 out of *****