Banshees of Inisherin

2022 - 10 - 21

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Image courtesy of "NPR"

A farmer gets dumped by his best friend in 'The Banshees of Inisherin' (NPR)

Colin Farrell plays the sweet-souled Irish farmer in Martin McDonagh's film. One day, his friend Colm (Brendan Gleeson) abruptly refuses to join him for ...

It's been a while since a movie extracted this much drama from the end of a beautiful friendship. McDonagh opens the story with gorgeous, postcard-worthy images of Inisherin, all lush green landscapes and even a rainbow in the sky. Compared with that movie's wildly uneven mix of comedy and tragedy, The Banshees of Inisherin is a quieter, gentler work, but its melancholy also cuts much deeper. He soon learns that Colm, who's played by Brendan Gleeson, has decided to end their decades-long friendship with nary a word of explanation. His character, Pádraic, is a sweet-souled farmer who's spent his entire life on Inisherin, a small, fictional island off the coast of Ireland. He's also proved willing to bury his good looks under mounds of prosthetics as the villainous Penguin in [The Batman](https://www.npr.org/2022/02/28/1083465564/the-batman-robert-pattinson-review).

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Image courtesy of "iNews"

Where was Banshees of Inisherin filmed? On location for Martin ... (iNews)

Also starring Kerry Condon as Pádraic's sister, Siobhán, and Barry Keoghan as a troubled young islander, Dominic Kearney, the drama deals with the breakup of ...

Permission for the former was given to use a fisherman’s cottage – the only house on the perfect crescent of sand that is Keem Beach. A confessional scene was also shot at St Thomas Church, the island’s 19th century Church of Ireland place of worship in the peaceful surroundings of Dugort. Unlike the Aran Islands, Achill is connected to the mainland by bridge and has a dramatic brooding beauty that chimed with the themes of the drama. One of the Aran Islands’ most notable heritage sites, it teeters on the edge of a cliff with a sheer 285ft drop down to the Atlantic Ocean churning below and was also used for a scene with Padraig and Colm. The cast and crew spent three weeks filming on the largest of the Aran Islands, Inishmore, which was the location for Padraig’s Cottage and other scenes. Achill Sound is also the finishing point for the popular off-road, 27-mile cycling and hiking route [The Great Western Greenway](https://greenway.ie/).

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Image courtesy of "The Walt Disney Company"

How Martin McDonagh's 'The Banshees of Inisherin' Tells a ... (The Walt Disney Company)

The film, now playing in theaters, stars Dubliners Colin Farrell and Brendan Gleeson, who reunite with director-writer Martin McDonagh, with whom they made In ...

“The sunsets and the skies were fantastic and lent themselves to a beautiful piece.” It was a dream to be able to come to these places.” Ultimately, McDonagh says he sought to create one of the most beautiful Irish films in cinematic history. McDonagh says he wanted to “capture the beauty of Ireland in the film and lean into that. The story is dark enough anyway, but we wanted the visuals and the locations to be as cinematic as possible.” For example, the mountainous geography of Inisherin impacts the story. The film would not have been possible without help from the locals on Inishmore and Achill, McDonagh adds. It was so strange and anomalous to have weather that was as consistently beautiful and almost Greek.” Condon adds that filming in Inishmore was like a “spiritual” experience: “The locations and scenery are characters in themselves.” “We came back a few steps from the coastline and found a location on the edge of the cliff to build the house, looking down over one long end of the island towards an ancient monument called Dún Aonghasa. Although the fictional island of Inisherin is unaffected, the tension on the mainland is palpable. The Banshees of Inisherin is set in 1923, just as the Civil War was raging in Ireland. Although he was born in London, McDonagh’s parents are Irish—his mother from Sligo and his father from Galway—and The Banshees of Inisherin pays tribute to the filmmaker’s heritage. “Inisherin is a fictional island, so I didn’t want it to be specifically one place,” adds McDonagh. For starters, the characters Pádraic and Colm were written specifically for Farrell and Gleeson, respectively—two of the most lauded, respected Irish actors working today.

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Image courtesy of "Polygon"

The Banshees of Inisherin review: 2022's funniest, darkest comedy (Polygon)

Colin Farrell, Brendan Gleeson, and writer-director Martin McDonagh reunite for a spiritual sequel to their 2008 assassin comedy-thriller In Bruges.

And until it strays off course, it remains a nuanced expression of this idea in the present, causing its characters to curdle and contort as they begin to believe they’re running out of time. As McDonagh tries to put words to his ethereal themes of mortality and remembrance in The Banshees of Inisherin, it winds up reading like an attempt to ground intangible spiritual dilemmas in concrete reasoning and definitive emotional paths. 21, with a national rollout to follow over the next few weeks. All of which makes the story more didactic and moralizing than the first two acts suggest it’s going to be. Colm doesn’t come right out and say it, but his sudden desire to create and to be remembered, like his idol Mozart, feels directly informed by the looming specter of death. The actual violence never touches Inisherin’s shores, and there’s certainly a case to be made that the film’s tale of brother turning against brother is a metaphor for the conflict, albeit a flimsy one. As the story unfolds, the absurdist playwright in McDonagh comes rushing to the fore in a way it hasn’t in any of his films since In Bruges. The Banshees of Inisherin is a return to familiar territory for writer-director Martin McDonagh: It plays like a spiritual sequel to his pitch-black 2008 comedy-thriller In Bruges. But McDonagh can’t quite find the right way to string all his heavy themes together once he enters its final act. He’s checking in on his pal Colm Doherty (Gleeson) to invite him to the local pub for a pint, per their usual routine. Those glimpses imbue the film with a borderline romantic warmth, which cinematographer Ben Davis paints with the dim flickers of candle- and lamplight. This time around, they play much simpler men — a farmer and a musician, respectively — but they have the same anguish as their assassin counterparts, resulting in a film that maintains a spiritual vice grip over its audience, in spite of the charming setting.

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Image courtesy of "Vox"

The Banshees of Inisherin: Even better if you know the Irish history ... (Vox)

Colin Farrell and Brendan Gleeson re-team for Martin McDonagh's riotous fable that's about more than a friend breakup.

But that dialogue is meant to take on a note of bitter irony — or perhaps the darkest of comedy, which are two sides of the same coin in Ireland. In the end, the characters muse that the conflict across the way seems to be subsiding, and it seems the conflict on Inisherin might be too, in the darkest of manners. The break between Colm and Pádraic works on its own terms, but it’s also a startlingly violent fight between men who are basically brothers, a fight that has a logic to it and yet is heartbreaking precisely because of the depth of history between them. In The Banshees of Inisherin, there’s no literal banshee, but it’s clear that’s the role that Mrs. They’re fantastic in the roles, Gleeson as a world-weary grump and Farrell as a naif who seems to be missing a few screws. The reason for the break is elusive to Pádraic, and even a bit elusive to Colm, who just can’t deal with his friend anymore.

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Image courtesy of "esquire.com"

'The Banshees of Inisherin' Is the Next Great Knitwear Film (esquire.com)

Brendan Gleeson, Colin Farrell, male misery and loads of great clothes.

“Colin, Brendan and Barry all loved the jumpers and, watching the film, I wish we had used more knitwear!” says Ní Mhaoldomhnaigh. But there is a heightened realism to this film, and to the story, so I didn’t want to be a slave to the clothing of the place. Inisherin isn’t a real place, but the film was shot on the actual island of Inishmore, the largest of the Aran Islands that sits at the mouth of Galway Bay, one of the original homes of the Aran jumper. To create a wardrobe that felt believable and suitably well worn, Ní Mhaoldomhnaigh pored over photos of fishermen and locals from the era, before her and her team created each item of clothing from scratch. His long coat and hat should give the sense of the cowboy striding across the landscape.” All the silhouettes and forms are true, but some of the colour is heightened.

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