The Banshees of Inisherin

"The Banshees of Inisherin" is fecking depressing and fecking awesome. Spoilers ahead.

We shall have to praise Martin McDonagh's virtues as a playwright for the script. Colm (Kul-em) no longer wants to speak to Padraic (Paw-drig). As any gifted writer does, McDonagh uses the immediacy and simplicity of the scenario to engage the audience and to build, from there, the film's fear, terror and question. Colm's rejection is simple to him: he wants to make interesting music and finds Padraic's dullness distracting. But, unbeknowst to Colm, he is destroying the very fibers of human connection, a bond more powerful and profound than any other in the world. He attempted to destroy the person Padraic had been for the last few decades, as he himself participated so much in Padraic's formation, while not expecting Padraic to, predictably, violently revolt against such evil.

Or, more likely, he intended this entirely, as destroying Padraic served only as a method to his ultimate goal: destroying himself. The film never fully eliminates the question: Why did Colm specifically target Padraic, when he continued speaking to everybody else? His repeated, and inaccurate, comments on immortality is only a reflection of the despair he has confessed to the priest, that of life meaning nothing; so, in making himself a masterpiece of pain, he believes he may make himself into something. A romantic sentiment appealing to many, the contradiction is that his despair comes from his living, and he is desperately clinging to life while he is rejecting it and throwing himself into his work. This inconsistency is most seen when he cares tenderly for Padraic, even after announcing his ultimatum to mutilate himself ever Padraic "bothers" him, by driving him home after an altercation, and by responding positively to Padraic's criticism.

This rage for something so elusive that even the searcher is baffled by its shape and nature is the manifestation of one of the film's great themes: the transformative, even mythical power of depression. Colm's lack of understanding of his own depression becomes Padraic's lack of understanding of Colm, in turn causing him to turn mad, feeling cramped in the pub, the sole gathering spot of the community, fearing insults, inviting in the village idiot, overvaluing his donkey. In all this Padraic becomes one more removed from his usual self, and we find him staring blankly at walls, making beautiful exhortations for kindness, deliberately disparaging and sabotaging others in order to increase his own standing. Colm denying each and every one of these attempts to innovate himself leads him to his final transformation, and ultimate despair: if he cannot love Colm, and Colm refuses to even appreciate his attempts to like or tolerate him, he can only hate Colm and become someone Colm hates, culminating in Padraic's actor, Colin Farrell, victoriously setting Colm's house ablaze, saving the dog as it was "the only good thing about him."

I can't say I am entirely unhappy, from a moral perspective, with Padraic's transformation. At the end of the film, Padraic is calm, confident, now that the madness of the past weeks has taken away all of his loved ones, that he will spend the rest of his days tormenting Colm. I am not sure if Colm anticipated this, but we know he believed his song, "The Banshees of Inisherin", ought to have been played at Padraic's funeral. Well, as we see it, Colm and his entourage of student musicians had played the song before Padraic furiously entered the pub, his donkey having died, eyes burning with murder. He seemed himself at peace with Padraic's vengeance.

Mrs. McCormick is, in some sense, a red herring. Colm's pseudo-intellectual garble on banshees no longer wailing, but waiting and observing is somewhat true, but it reflects his despair more than the truth. McCormick, acting in as the titular banshee with her grey and ugly appearance, actually seems to aid our characters in avoiding death. Her prediction that one, possibly two, people may die on the island is a warning, meant to make our characters wiser. She is seen beckoning Siobhan (See-o-vahn), Padriac's sister, from the opposite end of the river, encouraging her to come to the mainland and avoid the "Hamlet"-style bloodshed. She warns Padriac not to kill Colm's dog, as the feud may have spiralled even further out of control had he done so. She lures Peadar Kearney to his son's dead body, away from Padriac's house, where he has cooped up; the arrogant policeman, who expected a mouse out of Padriac, would then have seen a beast. This reveals more of Colm's fatalism: it is true that banshees portend death, but death is a natural process of life. The evil in death comes from human intention.

"The Banshees of Inisherin" follows a recent trend of films set in historical settings thematically revolving around suspicion, paranoia and disconnect - all modern themes. Ironically at the end of the year I saw a film tackling the themes of a film I saw in the beginning of the year, 2021's "Macbeth" (and both star Brendan Gleeson, funnily enough). Both try to update a tale as old as time, that of murder, by adding modern pathos to it, through indecision and confusion as depicted by facial expression, lighting, and the intonations around phrases and words. Yet "Banshees" succeeds because it has not made up its mind about its characters; to Joel Coen and Denzel Washington, Macbeth shall always be the tragic villain, while we are not sure what Padriac is at the end of the film, thereby ascending him above good and evil, becoming a demon in of himself. He becomes living proof that kindness does nothing to ennoble a man, in fact impoverishes, though we ourselves are unwilling to truly make this conclusion. The setting of the Irish Civil War reciprocates this feeling: kindness leads to weakness, leads to manipulation, leads to misfortune, forcing a man to enter his darkest thoughts and retaliate in kind, for the preservation of his life and his sanity - indeed, even as Padriac considered burning down Colm's house, with Colm in it, we see him sobbing inconsolably for Siobhan, his symbol for kindness, as if he knew what he was turning into. Forgetting, much less forgiving, is only possible after the man has become transformed so as to become completely unrecognizable. So it is with all war.

The film is...well, kind of creepy to me because I personally have been on both ends of this war, Padriac's and Colm's. To an audience, the war between these two had-been best friends seems small and random; to the participants, it's literally life and death. It is not an insubstantial feat for McDonagh to depict the conflict in both its local and Biblical aspects, something I haven't seen in a film before, something a number of film-makers have been trying to do recently and not achieving the proper alchemical blend. I myself have contemplated deeply on the origin of war, especially civil wars, or wars between neighbors, and "Banshees" has reiterated, perhaps intensified some of my thoughts: there should be no war, but humans are not privy to what madness in the mind causes war. There is something existential originating every war, and every war becomes a threat to existence rapidly. Siobhan, the sole female in the main cast, is most wise concerning the necessaries for decent living; she, much like the Trojan women of "The Iliad", tries to stop the cycle of violence, not preferring one side over the other and choosing the side of existence. To no avail; even the banshees have stopped questioning why men fight.