Martin McDonagh's best strength as a director, it is clear at this point, is that he gets to be in the exclusive business of making films with original screenplays by Martin McDonagh. With The Banshees of Inisherin, the celebrated playwright turned cinematic writer-director is now up to four feature films, and that's ample evidence to make a very important conclusion: he's just not very good at visual storytelling. The new film isn't such a catastrophe on that front as his last, 2017's swiftly ignored Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, which after all would take some doing; that film is quite likely the most visually infelicitous motion pictures to be nominated for Best Picture during the whole of the 2010s. But it's not doing very much at all with its chosen medium. The film was shot on islands off the west coast of Ireland, one of the very top landscapes on the face of the entire planet for being impossible to make unattractive, and even then, the best that McDonagh can manage with cinematographer Ben Davis (who also shot Three Billboards for McDonagh, and before that Seven Psychopaths in 2012 - the only McDonagh feature he didn't work on was the first, 2008's In Bruges, and I'm going to hazard a guess that it's no accident that's the only one of the director's films that looks worth a damn*) is "well that looks nice". And the cinematography isn't even the worst of it: whatever is going on with the editing, by Mikkel E.G. Nielsen (an Oscar winner for Sound of Metal, and a pretty creditable job it was, too), it needs some looking into, because it is very strange: working against all the rhythms of the dialogue, rarely motivated by the beats of the story. I assume, based on the overall "visual medium? what?" approach to the filmmaking that there might not have been appropriate coverage, but it almost feels like you'd have to work to make something this off-the-wall in its cutting.

The point is: cinema-wise, this is pretty much a wash, and ordinarily that's all it would take for me to write this off, maybe with a slightly nice "well, it's not good, but I had an okay time" pat on the head if the script is good. And the script is good - the script is bloody phenomenal, I'd go so far as to say. The Banshees of Inisherin is McDonagh's best screenplay, not by an enormous margin (I remain terribly fond of In Bruges), but by an unmistakable one; it's also his first screenplay that feels akin to his work as a theater writer, where his hit rate has been much higher than it has at the movies. Indeed, it feels in a certain distant way like he has at long last completed his mooted "Aran Islands Trilogy", which started with his second produced play, 1996's The Cripple of Inishmaan and continued with 2001's The Lieutenant of Inishmore; he completed a third play named for the easternmost and smallest of the Aran Islands, The Banshees of Inisheer, but junked it, suggesting that it was no good. Notwithstanding the clear affinities with the title, The Banshees of Inisherin isn't that story, but its setting on something like a fanciful version of one of the Aran Islands binds it with that play cycle, and there are unmistakable echoes in certain plot elements with both of the produced plays.

So how about those plot elements? The Banshees of Inisherin starts on a day of no real significance in 1923 (a year confirmed only somewhat later, but there are enough scattered references to the Irish Civil War of 1922-'23 happening over on the main island where none of our characters really care about it that we're clearly supposed to notice it), when affable Inisherin cowherd Pádraic Súilleabháin (Colin Farrell) finds, to his enormous confusion, that his best friend Colm Doherty (Brendan Gleeson) has decided to stop talking to him. Disregarding Colm's patient but thoroughly unfriendly explanation that he just doesn't want to keep wasting his time on a friendship that has run its course, Pádraic spends the next few days making a friendly pest of himself trying to figure out why Colm has made this choice, though the why is obvious: Pádraic is very nice but somewhat empty as a person, predictable, boring, and pedestrian, and Colm would rather do something new and productive with his life, starting by composing some music like he's always wanted to do. Refusing to accept this, presumably because of the incredible damage it would do to his ego, Pádraic grows increasingly obsessed with making Colm like him again, and in fairly short order, Inisherin bears witness to acts of shocking, blunt violence and nihilistic cruelty.

This is all incredibly Irish. The film's tone goes from light pastoral comedy to the bleakest, most caustic portrait of humans as fundamentally mean, selfish, stubborn, and prone to causing destruction and hurt just because, what the hell, it's something different. As it plunges into this cynical vision of the pettiest forms of humanity, it maintains a constant sense of good cheer and dry, playful humor, and that is the Irish thing about it; that sense that people being savage animals is ultimately more ridiculous and amusing than despairing. The film captures a loping, slang-driven way of speaking that's so precise and consistent that it can only possibly be either drawn from minute observation of real life, or entirely made up from whole cloth; either way, the London-born Irish-descended McDonagh gives the impression of understanding every element of these characters and their staid, insular culture of about two dozen human souls at a molecular level, able to evoke lifetimes spend finding these particular rhythms, and generations refining those rhythms before them. No film released in 2022 has anything close to this kind of sense of place in its writing, this sort of idiosyncratic but entirely organic way of thinking and speaking. Coupling that with the "but you gotta laugh at it" tenor to the wall-to-wall bleakness, the thing The Banshees of Inisherin most ends up reminding me of is what you'd get if the Coen brothers knew rural Ireland as well as they know Minnesota or Texas or their dream version of southern California. A comparison made downright inevitable by the score provided to Banshees by Carter Burwell, who either by his own initiative or on instruction has basically made a remix of his more minimalistic Coen scores. The net result is very familiar territory, in which exquisite dark humor is mined from average people getting mixed up in an ever-accelerating race towards catastrophe that comes entirely from their own inflated sense of their intelligence and ability.

The difference being that the Coens are world-class formal stylists in addition to their immaculate screenplays, and McDonagh is emphatically not that. That The Banshees of Inisherin remains compulsively watchable despite its almost complete lack of stylistic chops is testimony to the smooth way the author introduces his world and his characters, and then teases out their very bizarre falling-out into a subdued contemplation of how different kinds of bruised ego and mindless stubbornness can clash and turn into crises, how people lash out thoughtlessly to cause hurt as a way of distracting themselves from their own problem, how small towns are just steaming bogs of the worst impulses of humanity laid bare. All done with beautiful rivulets of fussily over-done dialogue; and all performed by a stunning cast. There's not a single weak performance in The Banshees of Inisherin, and multiple great ones: Farrell and Gleeson are obviously at the top of that list, reteaming with McDonagh 14 years after In Bruges to play a different kind of comic tragedy about the ways male friendships can go wrong. I am genuinely of the opinion that Farrell has never been better onscreen than in playing the wilfully obtuse Pádraic as someone grappling with the dissolution of his entire worldview, and even worse, the discovery that the worldview in question was such a flimsy little thing that there wasn't much to dissolve (Gleeson has been better, but he's still really good). The next two largest roles are also carried off by great actors: Pádraic's sister Siobhan, an exhausted pragmatist who just wants to avoid making this dull island even more dismal, is played terrifically by Kerry Condon in a performance that lacks the showy fireworks of any of the men, but effectively functions as the vital straight-man to the dry comic whirlwind of the story. The increasingly inevitable Barry Keoghan is on-hand to play the stock character of the island's resident idiot with some wonderfully harsh edges underlying the stereotypes; much like Pádraic's niceness becomes increasingly bullying and hostile as the film goes own, Keoghan is adept at making his character seem like he's weaponising his own stupidity as much as suffering from it.

It's all pretty great, troubling as it goes on, soaked in doom and the hanging spectre of despair as only something with "Banshees" right there in the title could (banshees, for those not in the know, are spirits whose presence is a harbinger of death, and the film's conceit is that in the modern world, they're mostly just amused to watch us sit back and fuck ourselves without any need for otherworldly interference). It is not, perhaps, necessarily great in ways that are different from how this might look in the form of e.g. a stage production; many scenes, with their close blocking and repetitive editing, feel very much like a middling film adaptation of a beloved play. But the fact is that it's not a play, and if it was, most of us would never get to enjoy these wonderful performances bringing it to life, and that all does count for something. A lot even - enough for me to slightly love The Banshees of Inisherin despite its almost complete lack of formal interest.

Tim Brayton is the editor-in-chief and primary critic at Alternate Ending. He has been known to show up on Letterboxd, writing about even more movies than he does here.

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*Glancing at Davis's filmography is a remarkably dispiriting experience, suggesting that he is, in fact, the guy you hire specifically to make things look flat and ugly and washed-out: such notably drab films as Eternals, the Tim Burton Dumbo, and The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel. I like the look of what he did for Clint Eastwood's Cry Macho just fine, but when that's one of the very best-shot films on your CV, something has gone wrong.