Martin McDonagh first paired Colin Farrell with Brendan Gleeson in his debut feature film, 2008's brutal black comedy In Bruges, casting them as a pair of hit men dispatched to the picturesque Belgian city.
The gruff, odd-couple intimacy they affected in that film – Gleeson's practised killer ministering to Farrell's first-timer, rattled by a botched job – underlies McDonagh's latest effort, though it concerns itself with a stage in their close-knit relationship more akin to a nasty divorce.
In addition to reuniting him with a couple of his esteemed countrymen, The Banshees of Inisherin marks McDonagh's return to his motherland of Ireland, the setting for much of his work in the theatre, after cinematic ventures to the European mainland, with In Bruges, and stateside, with Seven Psychopaths (2012) and Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri (2017).
