My Review of "The Banshees of Inisherin"

The Banshees of Inisherin is a smaller movie that came out back in 2022. There was a bit of a buzz about it but it didn't really peak my interest for a while. I didn't know what to make out of it. The trailers made it seem like some sort of period buddy movie. In a way it is.

It all starts out in April of 1923 within a very small town in Ireland. As you can tell everyone knows everyone in this small town and this movie kind of shows you some of the downsides of this. The whole movie is about the relationship between Padraic and his plutonic buddy Colm.

I guess these two have been friends for a while and then all of a sudden this one day Colm just doesn't want anything to do with Padraic. The movie doesn't give us any context of their relationship of what had happened. All this is going to be played out throughout this movie.

The concept is not as odd as you think about it. It even becomes a little more understandable as you watch it though. Padraic acts like any other person when they've just suddenly been cut off by a good friend. He doesn't know why this is happening and can't make sense of anything going on.

Colm isn't the best at cutting Padraic off either though. He just wants to cut their relationship off cold turkey. He doesn't quite understand why that doesn't work. We as the audience start to understand why he doesn't understand this either.

You see Colm is kind of a practical person. I guess one day he had an existential crisis and realized that he wants to be as utilitarian as possible. That would mean cutting out people that waste your time by talking nonsense. Padraic doesn't understand any of this so he has to pester Colm all the time about it, making everything worse.

Watching this relationship erode it got me thinking of how this is very much how certain actual relationships are in real life. They don't have the opportunity to hide within a big city of people as we do. The setting and environment of this movie really sets this movie apart and adds an extra element of dimension.

The movie will continue to get wackier and wackier as it progresses as well. Colm will take extreme measures to get rid of Padraic. There are also a lot of weird and nasty things that go on around this little town that affect each of the characters.

Although this is set in a different time and place it is still extremely relatable. I started to appreciate the time that we live in when I saw what everyone had to go through back then. Then again I come to realize we still have the same problems as we did back in those days. All of the themes and issues that they bring up are still very much problems that we have to deal with today.

Even though this movie is a bit haunting there is a sense of beauty about it. The shots are quite beautiful even in a creepy sort of way. They take their time to really put us into the environment of this movie and at times I can see people thinking it is dragging. I thought it was for dramatic effect but not everyone will appreciate it.

Overall, I had an okay time with this movie. I tend not to like having second hand embarrassment and awkwardness thrown upon me but there was a lot of comedy in there to keep me engaged. Though there is a lot of comedy there is an equal amount of darkness that cloud this movie. It's not for everyone but I'm kind of in the middle. I have to give this movie a 7 out of 10. I'm glad I watched it but I don't think I could watch through it again.