Martin McDonagh’s wickedly clever and unexpectedly touching “The Banshees of Inisherin” begins with a sudden death — of a friendship. Padraic (Colin Farrell) and Colm (Brendan Gleeson), longtime neighbors on a small island off the coast of Ireland, have been friends for many years, until one day suddenly they aren’t. “I just don’t like you no more,” says a stony Colm, by way of explaining why he’s abruptly begun to avoid Padraic on trips to the island’s only pub. Padraic’s face crumples upon hearing it, like a slip of paper about to be thrown away. “You liked me yesterday,” he says, mystified.
It’s been 20 years since McDonagh, Farrell and Gleeson teamed up for “In Bruges,” a movie that somehow managed to endearingly blend gory violence and quirky character comedy (and left me permanently unable to think of the city in its title without appending a profane adjective) — and what a treat it is to see them together again. “The Banshees of Inisherin” is a touch less gory (just a touch, mind you; don’t bring the kids), but it likewise blends unlikely ingredients into a perfect stew — an Irish one, in this case. Set on the fictional island of Inisherin in 1923, against a backdrop of Irish civil war on the mainland that the island inhabitants don’t seem too concerned about, McDonagh’s tale is both a tiny story of two men, and a larger allegory of what happens when a small disagreement spins out of control.
We don’t learn much about Padraic and Colm’s friendship before the fateful day Colm ends things, and that’s probably because there isn’t much to learn; their kinship came not from shared interests and ideas, but proximity. Padraic, a sweetly uncomplicated man who lives with his sister Siobhan (Kerry Condon) and his beloved miniature donkey Jenny, isn’t the brightest of bulbs, and you can see how anyone might tire of his “aimless clatterin’,” as Colm describes it. Roughly a generation older than Padraic, Colm is having something of an existential midlife crisis; he’s tired of wasting time, and he’ll do almost anything to push his former friend away, including a few things that might horrify the squeamish.
