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).
Whatever your opinion of the guy's previous films – for all the awards they've picked up, they remain divisive – Banshees proves the most mature offering from the typically trigger-happy writer-director by a verdant country mile (and could even become his most-laurelled, if its bevy of Globe noms augur future triumphs).
A clean-shaven Farrell plays Pádraic, a man of few and simple pleasures, even for an inhabitant of the fictional island of the film's title, circa 1923. There, the tail end of the Irish Civil War registers primarily via the occasional sound of explosions from across the water – the violence abstracted, and seemingly of little bearing on village life.
Among the workaday rituals that comprise Pádraic's life, first and foremost is wiling away the afternoon at the local watering hole, pint by pint, with Gleeson's Colm. (Second is communing with Jenny, his miniature donkey.)
For years – aye, decades – Pádraic and Colm's friendship has been something that the townsfolk could set their clocks to.
Unfortunately for Pádraic, some tectonic shift has taken place in Colm: The film opens with Pádraic dropping by his pal's house to collect him for their daily pub pilgrimage, but the older man remains inside, refusing even to acknowledge him.
"Have ye been rowing?" asks the bartender (Pat Shortt) when Pádraic fronts up alone. "I don't think we've been rowing," he replies. (Variations on this question-and-answer echo across the film's early section – McDonagh's patter is as dense with repetition as ever, though it's rendered especially poetic here by the rustic Irish idiom.)
They haven't been rowing, clarifies Colm on being pressed. His new and increasingly staunch desire to avoid Pádraic has no particular root cause, and so no apparent remedy. "I just don't like ye no more," he says.
His justification recalls the protagonist of Herman Melville's short story Bartleby, the Scrivener, who decides one day to simply stop performing his professional duties, demurring by way of the maddening catchphrase, "I would prefer not to."
When Colm makes his return to the pub – a figure as rough-hewn and apparently as immovable as the immense, craggy coastline – he enforces separate tables: Sitting by the window, he stares pointedly into his beer, while Pádraic, seated at parallel to him on the other side of the glass, peers through the lightly misted pane with baleful puppy dog eyes, eyebrows expressively akimbo.
The absurdity of the scenario, its humour tinged with poignancy, recalls Samuel Beckett, another of McDonagh's countrymen and a hallowed touchstone of his, as much as Bartleby.
As the pressure mounts on Colm to make nice, however – with everyone from Pádraic's sister (Kerry Condon) to the local priest (David Pearse) weighing in on the unceremonious break-up – McDonagh mixes in a few generous dollops of another of his key artistic forefathers, Quentin Tarantino.
And I'm not talking about the profanity – although, as anyone who's seen (or heard) a McDonagh film before would guess, there's certainly no feckin' shortage of that.
Colm is willing to go to considerable extremes to keep his ex-bestie away: Should Pádraic even attempt to talk to him, he warns, he will cut off one of his own fingers. Coming from a man with a stated wish to dedicate himself anew to playing the fiddle, this ultimatum seems a more literal example than most of cutting off one's nose to spite one's face.
Baffled by Colm's cold shoulder and finding little joy in the company of his new drinking buddy Dominic, generally regarded as the village idiot (played by The Killing of a Sacred Deer's Barry Keoghan, a captivatingly puckish talent), Pádraic cannot help from making an overture or two to his old buddy.
It's no spoiler to confirm that appendage-hacking ensues – where Beckett brought Waiting for Godot to a close with a bathetic whimper, the prospect of self-harm discussed but not enacted, McDonagh, like Tarantino, relishes pushing his characters to their limits way too much to forego banging them around. While it's not accompanied by a Stealers Wheel needle drop, there is still a kind of brutal humour in the outsized 'thunk' of a severed finger striking Pádraic's door, in gruesome reproach of his too-chummy conduct.
That Pádraic's solicitousness should eventually curdle into resentment suggests Banshees be read as allegory – a microcosm of the tit-for-tat violence between brothers (actual or otherwise) that bloodies Irish history, both before and after the Civil War. "Good luck to ye, whatever it is you're fighting about" is Pádraic's response to the sounds of conflict in the distance.
It's true that the violence in McDonagh's work is most often shown to be senseless – innocent victims are inevitably struck down in the quest for vengeance; elaborate heists come to nought, but leave a trail of bodies in their wake.
The lesson, if it be one, is less than effective, however, when his characters are so thuddingly myopic ("You're all fecking boring!" exclaims Pádraic's fed-up sister, and she's not wrong), and the bleak pleasures of his work lie precisely in their being pitted against one another.
The Banshees of Inisherin is in cinemas from December 26.
