Martin McDonagh’s new film is a macabre black comedy of toxic male pride and wounded male feelings, a shaggy-dog story of wretchedness and a dance of death between aggression and self-harm, set on an imaginary island called Inisherin off the Irish coast. It’s happening in 1923 during the civil war; the additional symbolic acrimony is offered to us on a take-it-or-leave-it basis.
As with so many of McDonagh’s works, the glint of the unburied hatchet is all too visible in the murk, and the setting is a stylised and ironised Irish rural scene not so very far from John Millington Synge. Mutilation is a familiar motif. There are plenty of genuine laughs in this movie, but each of them seems to dovetail into a banshee-wail of pain.
