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esteeb.art · @esteeb.art@bridge.neodb.net

Rated The Banshees of Inisherin 8/10

<strong>Official Hater Club Movie Challenge #1: A24 Vibes<strong> Martin McDonagh's <i>The Banshees of Inisherin<i> is a lot of things: pitch black comedy, fable, tone poem, character study, and the culmination of all my emotional baggage in one movie. I won't get too much into it because otherwise I'm paying my therapist for nothing and that's not what this site is for. But sufficed to say, I think it's easy for anyone to relate to the idea of a friendship ending abruptly. In our modern context the chief method for this is just kind of ghosting people. Disappearing under the guise of being too busy or whatever and, for people like me who don't live in a small town or, say, on an island, that seems like the most painless way to do it for the one doing the moving on. I'm not going to lie and say I haven't done it either, or been ok with it happening when I see it coming. This is all to say that this movie presents an interesting thought experiment. See cause when it happens to you there's always these questions right? <blockquote><i>What did I do wrong? Why didn't they just tell me? Why not let me have a chance to fix it?<i><blockquote> Obviously you crave closure, you want a chance to say goodbye or fuck you or whatever. But <i>Banshees<i> presents you with exactly that. What if you had no other choice but to have that confrontation? What if you didn't have a city or a phone or even just another fucking bar to hide in? I just watched it so I'm still spinning it around in my head, but for the life of me, I can't figure out if the conflict here feels cruel because I've been conditioned to play the game the way I previously described or if I feel like it was braver, kinder even, for the honesty however painful it was. I don't think the movie knows either. There is as much regret as there is vindication floating in the ether of this movie. The whole thing feels like it's asking for forgiveness as well as understanding. Forgiveness from those we leave behind but the understanding that it was a matter of life and death. The movie is obviously framing it in the context of artistic or intellectual fulfillment but it doesn't have to be just that. Because, ultimately, we all have to move on from places and people in order to grow. That doesn't make us bad people, generally speaking, but that also doesn't absolve us from the damage we leave in our wake. All of which is a hard pill to swallow in a time where you really never have to lose touch with anyone you don't want to and we are socialized to prioritize niceness over our own well being. I wasn't really prepared for the movie to take the turns that it did and I'll cop to maybe taking the subject matter a little too personally. But I want to emphasize this was a really fascinating, funny (like <i>really<i> funny), beautiful, melancholic piece that I really enjoyed. I'm obviously late to the party on this one as everyone was already giving this movie it's flowers when it came out a couple years ago. So I don't think there's much else I can add that hasn't already been said about the cast, the script, the visuals, etc.. I'll just end this by saying it's a work that is going to haunt me for a while, I think. That's not necessarily a bad thing though. Oh, and while I'm not one to tell artists how to do their jobs, um...they didn't need to do Jenny like that and I will fight McDonagh over this.

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Published 2025-01-11 00:00 UTC · bridged from Atmosphere