The Banshees of Inisherin 4K 2022 2160p WEB-DL

1923. Against the backdrop of the Irish Civil War, the conflict between Patrick and Colm's two best friends unfolds. They live on the remote island of Inisherin and suddenly stop communicating, with shocking consequences.

The Banshees of Inisherin 4K Review
The year is 1923, the Irish Civil War is underway, and there are about a hundred people living on the remote island of Inisherin. In the evenings they gather in the pub, drinking, playing instruments, talking about everything and nothing. It is also where the shepherd Podrick (Colin Farrell) and the fiddler Kalm (Brendan Gleeson) used to talk nonsense all day long, who one day realizes the transience of life. He decides not to waste time on idle talk, so he asks his best friend to never speak to him again, and for every disobedience he threatens to cut off a finger.

Martin McDonagh will first win the awards season with the controversial "Three Billboards on the Edge of Ebbing, Missouri," and then try his hand at the philosophical storytelling genre and win the Venice Film Festival's Best Screenplay Award (and lead actor Colin Farrell wins the Volpi Cup for Best Actor). It's always a pleasure when a director first manages to make ordinary audiences fall in love with him, and then succeeds in complicating his style and attracting the attention of festival snobs (Edgar Wright did the same). He charmed the former with his dry, sarcastic working-class humor, the latter with the image of a confused man.

In "lay low in Bruges" and "Seven Psychopaths" deep, inexplicable melancholy slipped among the skirmishes and verbal piques, and in "Banshee Inisherina" sadness gradually infects all the villagers. Its first victim is Kalm, who sharply realizes the meaninglessness of existence: he explains to Podrick that his good name will not be remembered in decades, but the music will remain in eternity. So Kalm writes a work called Banshee Inisherina, which is difficult to call great, but for its author is much more important the very fact of its creation. The discourse of spiritual torment is incomprehensible to the shepherd, for he is not accustomed to making sense of his existence. The Podrick is just a good guy, and that is enough for him; he shares the musician's feelings only in moments of pangs of loneliness that scare him to the core. Podrick persistently tries to find out from Kalm the reasons for breaking off their friendship, not understanding why he needs this relationship so much. The answer is devastating - without a friend, Podrick is left alone with his life as a loser with nothing behind him by the time he is fifty. There have been characters like Podrick in McDonagh's previous works (sometimes played by Sam Rockwell), except that they enjoyed their sincerity and stupidity without thinking about the consequences of their actions. In "Banshee Inisherina," the fool meets an existential crisis that he can't handle on his own.

Mildred in "Three Billboards on the Edge of Ebbing, Missouri" is trapped in a similar hopelessness, unable to free herself from the corrosive spectrum of her feelings: devoured by grief for her murdered daughter and burned by lust for revenge. No matter what she did, there was no bringing back the dead. The humanistic message is typical of McDonagh, and it seems that in "Banshee Inisherina" he treads on the shaky ground of existential drama. The emptiness that Podrick faces has been felt by other characters in McDonagh's films: it could be heard in Sheriff Bill's suicide shot (Woody Harrelson; Three Billboards), in Hans' miserable fate (Christopher Walken; Seven Psychopaths) or Ray's endless guilt (Colin Farrell; Laying low in Bruges). Only in "Banshee" can you feel the fear of the big life.

All the characters in the film live on a small piece of their island and hear distant gun blasts - echoes of war that don't bother them at all. This plot element is important to the director, who made the film in a year of endless storms: the storming of the Capitol in the United States, the revolution in Myanmar, the takeover of Afghanistan by terrorists and a host of other high-profile events. They resemble a military cannonade, suppressing any feelings and emotions with its noise. Except that the echoes of the explosions barely reach Inisherin Island, so Podrick and Kalm do not even think about the events of national importance. For them, the big land is something far away and unexplored, where only Podrick's sister Siobhan (Kerry Condon) dares to go. She combines the traits of the two main characters: she is just as strongly aware of the futility of being, but chooses to live, no matter what. The men, as is common with McDonagh, choose death because of helplessness, but take a step back at the very end.

The only thing that spoils "Banshee Inisherina" is the clichéd pathos. McDonagh admires beautiful shots of the Irish wilderness, uses fairy-tale motifs, characters and even the meaningful figure of a donkey, a sign of mystical cinema (from Buñuel's "The Andalusian Dog" to Enyedi's "My 20th Century"). Without them, the author would have had the purest drama on his favorite subject: the human response to mental torment. As a true humanist, Martin McDonagh comes to one conclusion: there is darkness in everyone, but there will always be more light, even if one hears cannon shots in the distance.