‘Banshees of Inisherin’ review: McDonagh film is nuts — and hysterical
TORONTO — Give Martin McDonagh a topic like friendship to tackle, and he’s bound to warp it into something so subversive, so twisted, so extreme … that you’ll laugh your ass off for two full hours.
And so the writer/director has with his scorching new movie “The Banshees of Inisherin,” which saw its North American premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival on Monday night.
THE BANSHEES OF INISHERIN
Running time: 109 minutes. Rated R (language throughout, some violent content and brief graphic nudity). In theaters Oct. 21.
“Banshees,” reuniting Brendan Gleeson and Colin Farrell from “In Bruges,” is a scream from start to finish-erin.
The brilliant dark comedy (almost needless to say with McDonagh at this point) is about a man named Colm (Gleeson) who lives on an island off the coast of Ireland who unexpectedly tells his best friend Pádraic (Farrell) he no longer wants to speak to him. A nice little domestic story of strife and reconciliation, right? Wrong. There are amputations and deaths.
To prove he’s not bluffing, Colm tells Pádraic that every time he utters a word to him, he’ll cut off one of his fingers. The tiff begins to spiral out of control as the 1920s Irish Civil War rages on the mainland across the water.
McDonagh revels in these simple, sit-com plot structures while layering on smarts, sophistication and chilling atmosphere. His fabulous Broadway play “Hangmen” last season amounted to little more than: “What would happen if a former executioner owned a pub?”
As with “Hangmen,” his other plays and films like “In Bruges” and “Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri,” the director grabs us with his detailed, human, whack-job characters.
Colm, for instance, is the sort of grizzled and threatening guy who’d kill you in a fight and not think much of it later on down at the pub. Yet he plays the violin, adores Mozart and dreams of composing a timeless song for the ages.
Pleasant, gullible Pádraic has a pet donkey who roams around the house like a puppy. His common-sense sister, a bookworm named Siobhan (Kerry Condon), hates that he’s turned their living room into a barnyard.
For two characters who are in a messed up feud, the actors who play them have palpable chemistry. Even though cranky Colm ended the friendship for reasons that are sort of revealed later on, there is a tenderness to his persona, even a deep spirituality.
Farrell, doing some of his finest work ever, plays Pádraic so innocently and sweet that we both want to comfort the guy and understand why somebody would ban him from their life.
Every character has that sort of fascinating duality — and “Banshees” features an entire cast of standouts.
Dominic (Barry Keoghan, sensational), the local dimwit and son of the only police officer in town, is in love with Siobhan, and when he takes his shot with her on the beach, it’s one of the film’s funniest and saddest scenes.
There are a million terrific little quirks. Colm and an aggressive priest nearly come to blows in the confessional; one townsperson is an old woman who looks like a witch and predicts the future like a soothsayer; we learn that bread trucks are leading causes of fatality in Ireland.
You won’t find a funnier movie this year.
