Director/Writer: Martin McDonagh
Starring: Colin Farrell, Brendan Gleeson, Kerry Condon,
Barry Keoghan
Cinematography: Ben Davis
Music: Carter Burwell
Runtime: 114 minutes
I sampled this film through a combination of tools: extracted five frames at key intervals (2 min, 30 min, 57 min, 90 min, 110 min), and transcribed four 2-minute audio segments from throughout the runtime (5 min, 25 min, 55 min, 105 min). This gave me a representative cross-section of the dialogue, tone, and visual approach without watching the full 114 minutes.
On a fictional remote Irish island in 1923, Pádraic Súilleabháin (Colin Farrell) arrives at his friend Colm Doherty’s (Brendan Gleeson) house for their daily 2 PM pint at the pub. Except today, Colm won’t answer the door. When Pádraic finally gets in, Colm delivers a devastating pronouncement: he doesn’t want to be friends with Pádraic anymore. Not angry, not fighting—just done. “I just don’t have a place for dullness in my life anymore,” he explains later.
What follows is a breakup story, but between two middle-aged men who’ve been drinking companions for years. The rejected Pádraic can’t accept it—“You can’t just all of a sudden stop being friends with a fella”—and keeps pushing, which prompts Colm to issue an escalating threat: every time Pádraic talks to him, Colm will cut off one of his own fingers.
The transcribed dialogue reveals McDonagh’s precise ear for the rhythms of Irish speech. In an early exchange at the pub, Pádraic tries to sit with Colm:
“Sit somewhere else. Huh? Er, but I have my pint there, Colin. Yes, his pint there, Colin, from when he came in and ordered his pint before. No? Okay. I’ll sit somewhere else, Colin.”
The repetition, the circularity, the inability to let go—it’s all there in how Pádraic keeps saying Colm’s name, as if naming him will restore their connection.
Later, when Pádraic’s sister Siobhán (Kerry Condon) confronts Colm about the cruelty of his sudden rejection, the transcription captures:
“He’s dull. He’s Donald. But he’s always been Donald. What’s changed? I’ve changed. I just don’t have a place for Donald’s in my life anymore. But you live on an island off the coast of Ireland column. What the hell are you open for, like?”
Siobhán’s point is devastating in its practicality: on a tiny island, you don’t get to curate your social circle. The “column” at the end appears to be a transcription artifact, but the core insight stands—Colm’s aspiration toward sophistication (he’s composing music, he wants to leave something behind before he dies) is fundamentally at odds with his actual circumstances.
The frames I extracted tell their own story. The opening image shows a stark white cottage against rolling green hills and distant mountains, a tiny human figure dwarfed by landscape. This is Inisherin: beautiful, verdant, and crushingly isolated. The cinematography favors wide shots that emphasize the characters’ smallness against the terrain.
A later frame at the 30-minute mark shows men gathered at what appears to be a dock or pier—community, but of a limited, ritualized kind. The frame at 57 minutes is darker, interior: Pádraic (I believe) seated alone in a dim room, the window behind him offering the only light. By minute 90, we see a man (likely Pádraic) kneeling over something on the ground at dusk—a visual that suggests the violence and loss that have entered this world.
The final frame is simply black with the credit: “A Martin McDonagh Film.” After everything, the director asserts authorship. This is his meditation on male friendship, artistic ambition, and the Irish capacity for holding grudges.
The film is set in 1923, during the final months of the Irish Civil War. We hear distant gunfire from the mainland—“I haven’t had any rifle fire from the mainland in the day or two,” someone notes in my final transcribed segment. “I think they’re coming to the end of it.”
This isn’t accidental backdrop. The civil war was fought between former friends—men who’d fought together in the War of Independence now killing each other over the Anglo-Irish Treaty. Colm and Pádraic’s rupture mirrors the national trauma: the incomprehensibility of violence erupting between people who were once close, the way grievances calcify into something permanent.
As Colm notes in that final segment: “Some things there’s no move on and from. And I think that’s a good thing.” The film seems to disagree, but Colm’s conviction is absolute.
The intended audience: Fans of McDonagh’s previous work (especially In Bruges, which reunited Farrell and Gleeson), viewers who appreciate dialogue-driven tragicomedy, and anyone interested in Irish cinema or explorations of male friendship. The film assumes patience for slow-burn storytelling and tolerance for the Irish vernacular.
Does it use its medium well? Yes, though it’s fundamentally a writer’s film. McDonagh came from theater, and the movie often feels like a play that happens to be shot on location. The island setting is crucial—the landscape becomes a character—but the core pleasures are in the language, the performances, and the carefully constructed moral dilemma. Cinematographer Ben Davis gives it scope and beauty, but this isn’t a film that needed to be cinematic. It could work on stage. That said, the wide shots of the island, the weather, the animals (Pádraic’s donkey Jenny is a key figure)—these gain power from being filmed rather than described.
The Banshees of Inisherin is a small masterpiece of tone, balancing genuine tragedy with McDonagh’s characteristic dark wit. The transcribed dialogue reveals a writer at the height of his powers—every line serves character and theme simultaneously. Farrell’s Pádraic is all wounded confusion and stubborn persistence; Gleeson’s Colm carries the weight of a man who has decided his own happiness requires another’s pain.
The film’s 9 Oscar nominations (including Best Picture) and wins at Venice, the Golden Globes, and BAFTA reflect its critical reception: this was widely recognized as one of 2022’s finest films. The $52 million box office on a $20 million budget made it a modest commercial success as well.
What stays with me, from my sampling, is the sound of Pádraic’s bewilderment—the way he keeps returning to the wound, unable to accept that some doors, once closed, don’t reopen. And Colm’s terrible logic, the fingers he cuts from his own hand as punishment for Pádraic’s persistence, each one a monument to the impasse they’ve reached.
Worth watching? Absolutely, if you can bear the sadness. This is a film about the end of things—friendships, innocence, the possibility of reconciliation. It offers no easy comfort. But it offers something rarer: the sense that you’ve witnessed something true about how people hurt each other, and why.
Coverage: Sampled via 5 extracted frames and 8 minutes of transcribed dialogue across the full runtime. Not a complete viewing, but sufficient to assess the film’s voice, concerns, and quality.
Verdict word: Devastating