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The Banshees of Inisherin

✭ ✭ ✭ ✭   Read critic reviews

Ireland, United Kingdom, United States · 2022
1h 54m
Director Martin McDonagh
Starring Colin Farrell, Brendan Gleeson, Kerry Condon, Barry Keoghan
Genre Comedy, Drama

Pádraic and Colm have been best friends for many years, which is why Pádraic is shocked and confused when Colm abruptly tells him he no longer wants to be friends. Their conflict escalates as Pádraic struggles to not speak to his former pal and Colm becomes increasingly frustrated.

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What are people saying?

Zoe Rogan Profile picture for Zoe Rogan

Martin McDonagh is back on form with this black comedy about friendship, aging, and artistic legacy. Channeling Samuel Beckett, The Banshees of Inisherin is absurd like Waiting for Godot, but with effective tragedy emphasized towards the film's end.

What are critics saying?

91

Collider by Brian Formo

Like the sparse land of its setting, Inisherin is a film that reveals multitudes through observation and reflection. While I’m writing mostly of its emotional seriousness, it is also compassionate and humorous.

83

IndieWire by David Ehrlich

This isn’t a film that strives for big laughs — McDonagh seems more interested in putting you in a particular frame of mind, even when doing so requires a fair bit of downtime and dead air — but its constant undercurrent of humor affords the story’s most pressing questions an appropriately ridiculous context, one that speaks to the absurdities of all existence.

100

Variety by Guy Lodge

The result feels closer than any of his previous films to the barbed, intimate lyricism of McDonagh’s work as a playwright, and more deeply, sorrowfully felt to boot.

90

Uproxx by Mike Ryan

Like In Bruges, The Banshees of Inisherin is a dark movie that is often downright hilarious.

80

Vanity Fair by Richard Lawson

Those wary of McDonagh after the bulldozer that was Billboards should seek out this film; at its best, The Banshees of Inisherin whispers and laments and amuses the way McDonagh’s best stage writing does. And it offers the invaluable opportunity to see Farrell in his hangdog element, as Pádraic scrambles about trying to find purchase in the world, ever creaking and groaning in motion.

100

The Telegraph by Robbie Collin

This is an often shoulder-shudderingly funny film, whose comic dialogue is dazzlingly designed and performed. But McDonagh leaves fate itself with the last, black, bone-rattling laugh.

91

The Playlist by Rodrigo Perez

Rich, layered, and full of beautiful shapeshifting emotional depth—at times laugh-out-loud funny, and then stopping on a dime to turn melancholy, heartrending, and or horrifying—The Banshee of Insherin will surely unsettle audiences trying to pinpoint blame or ascribe a hero or villain to the piece. Its morality and personal sympathies are purposefully opaque.

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