Colin Farrell and Kerry Condon in the film THE BANSHEES OF INISHERIN. Photos by Jonathan Hession. Courtesy of Searchlight Pictures. © 2022 20th Century Studios All Rights Reserved.
The Banshees of Inisherin (2022) was a weird moody lil flick, and I loved it although I will admit my attention wandered. What if your best friend decided to be done with you? How would you take it? An aging violinist, suddenly aware of the limits of his remaining time on earth, decides that no more of it must be wasted on “chats” with a “dull man.” Tragedy unfolds around the impossibility of this proposition.
The main pleasure of this film for me was the gorgeous photography – set on an island just off the mainland of Ireland in 1923, towards the end of the Irish Civil War, we feel in the green fields and shale cliffs a bit of what it must have been like to live in this small, isolated community on the edge of the world. The landscape and the clothes – I particularly love the woolens on Padraic (Colin Farrell), who makes for one cozy looking sheephand. The idyllic setting sells the quirky characters, who live an uncomfortably close, dirty, news-starved, hardscrabble life in an emerald paradise.