Banshee's All That?

The Oscar nominations were announced this morning. To the surprise of no one who was following the precursor nominations of various Hollywood guilds, The Banshees of Inisherin was one of the Best Picture nominees. Clearly, there is a receptive audience for the movie. I'm simply not in it.

Set in the 1920s on a small island off the coast of Ireland, the movie centers on Pádraic, who arrives one afternoon at the house of his longtime drinking buddy Colm, only to discover that Colm no longer wants to be his friend. No explanation is sufficient for Pádraic, no tactic Colm takes to end the relationship sufficient to put the matter to rest. And this taking place in a tiny town on a tiny island, the problem simply isn't going to go away. Indeed, it soon escalates to unthinkable extremes.

The Banshees of Inisherin comes from writer-director Martin McDonagh, who's been hit or miss for me. I found his In Bruges to be one of those movies that's far more fun to quote than it is to actually watch. On the other hand, I truly loved Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri. But for me, The Banshees of Inisherin falls more in the former camp.

I suppose I should have expected that, what with this movie reuniting the two key stars of In Bruges, Colin Farrell and Brendan Gleeson. Both are good enough here, if outshined by co-stars Barry Koeghan and (especially) Kerry Condon. But also, none of these are Big Performances. The acting is earnest, but muted. It seems as though it's the turns of the plot that are meant to be big here.

And that they are. The movie does have a couple of funny moments, but generally the "black comedy" here is pitch dark. I found characters, setting, everything about the movie to emphasize isolation to such an extreme as to put the audience at a distance too. I simply didn't find the story accessible on any level. (It probably didn't help that I'm watching another "Irish story" right now, the TV series Derry Girls. It's much bolder, bigger, and laugh-out-loud funny. That'll be a topic for a future blog post. For now, suffice it to say that I found this movie dour by comparison.)

I'd love to be able to describe just who I think this movie is for. I do know of at least a couple of people who have seen it and did like it -- but there's no obvious throughline connecting them that wouldn't apply to me too. And my rating for the movie? D+. The "moments" here are just too few and far between for me.