The Banshees of Inisherin Review

McDonagh's premise is almost insultingly small: one man on a remote island decides he no longer likes his friend, and declines to explain. What grows out of that refusal is the film's real subject, because Colm's escalating self-mutilation is exactly as rational as the civil war audible across the water, and the film never underlines the parallel. Colin Farrell does the hardest work, playing a man whose defining quality is niceness and finding real desolation in it; the scene where Padraic finally turns cruel over a pint is the year's best piece of screen acting.

Brendan Gleeson keeps Colm opaque enough that we are never allowed the comfort of a diagnosis. Kerry Condon has the only clear sight in the picture and the film knows it, which is why her departure lands harder than any of the severed fingers. Ben Davis shoots Inisherin as a place of enormous beauty and no exits. The animal symbolism is heavy and the last act's fire is a touch schematic, but the dialogue is McDonagh at his most controlled, funny right up to the moment it stops being funny.