Interesting that you don’t care for parables, but do care for horror movies!
it had this wonderful sad song from Brahms in it and the OST was done by Carter Burwell. So, that was great. I don’t buy the characters motivation (Gleeson), it would be a better movie without any self mutilation.
“The great gaels of Ireland are the men that God made mad, for all their wars are merry, and all their songs are sad”
I liked it. It didn’t thrill me, and I’m kinda conflicted about it, but ultimately I enjoyed it.
I feel like this is a type of story that I’ve come across previously, where one character embraces nihilism in some form, and another more romantic character, or character(s), are completely unable to deal with it, because it threatens their entire world view.
Of course Colm isn’t a nihilist, but he adopts a new set of values that poses the same challenge to Padraic.
I feel like it gets confused here, because my impression - even if the movie disagrees with me - is that Colm has serious mental issues, and for me that affects the weight of his arguments.
In these stories, what infuriates everybody is the fact that the nihilist makes so much sense that there’s nothing they can do or say, and that ends up driving them into madness. Or forces some other change in them.
In this one, he just bullies people into accepting his argument. That’s not nearly as interesting.
I feel like McDonagh struggles to be consistent. For a lot of this, I was really into the dialogue, but then there’s a part like the bread van joke, which was funny, but it was so contrived it came off like a Mel Brooks gag, and that kinda took me out of it.
I love that they use the word “so” instead of “then”. We do the same thing here, we use “så” which sounds similar. That kept delighting me throughout :)
I love McDonaghs dialogue, and the acting performances and cinematography were excellent. I think that it got just a little bit too dark for me.
4/5
I would love to see Gleeson, Farrell, and Keoghan in a straight ahead comedy.
Killing of a Sacred Deer is two-thirds of the way there! But, yes, such tremendous actors with a unique talent for comedy.
Killing of a Sacred Deer seconded. But then I love all Lanthimos.
I loved Killing of a Sacred Deer, but I’m not sure I’d consider it a “straight ahead comedy”!
I love Barry Keoghan, but it almost felt like too obvious a role for him. I think he brought all the weight to it that he could, but I wish there had been more to the character.
I’m thrilled to say I love everything Colin Farrel is doing these days. I used to ignore him as sort of a Tom Cruise action-hero-sex-symbol, but now that he’s taking these roles where he can let loose, and he can be horrible or ugly (like The North Water or The Batman) or pathetic or mundane (Lanthimos and this) I think he’s just fricken tremendous.
Good on him. I like him a lot more than Tom Cruise now :)
I hope all you Colin Farrell fans have watched After Yang!
Damn! Some great posts in here, Qt3! I saw this film a few weeks ago but just read these comments for the first time. I’d say y’all have done a nice job capturing everything I enjoyed about it along with the one thing that holds me back from loving it more completely which is the intrinsic limits of such a parable that Tom pointed out.
The story structure nerd in me just wanted to reply to this comment from Bagger McG:
It does appear this way, right? My daughter said the exact same thing after we watched it. But this is a great example of how arthouse writer/directors often make this plot beat more subtle.
Rather than showing us their friendship early in the film, Act 1 (the status quo, the world before) starts out with Pádraic hearing word that he and Colm are rowing but he denies it to himself and everyone he meets. The inciting event comes when Colm personally confirms the rumor in this moment:
“I just don’t like you no more.” Colin Farrell’s performance in his reaction to this is just so good.
So this is the lightning bolt moment where the story really starts for poor Pádraic. He moves from plausible denial in early Act 1 to implausible denial for the rest of Act 1 and most of Act 2. Then comes grief and violence.
This is the story structure equivalent of “cutting to the chase.” You jump a bit further ahead before you even start, thereby skipping more traditional narrative setup and instead doing something more unexpected with the storytelling.
It’s a bit like how Raising Arizona or Licorice Pizza start out with “love at first sight” in the opening scene rather than using it as the inciting event. Or movies like Arrival or Don’t Look Up don’t use the alien invasion or the meteor sighting as the inciting event, they stick those scenes at the opening instead. This frees them up to find other inciting events to better support the plot. (In Arrival, it’s when Louise is tasked with translating the Heptapod language. In Don’t Look Up, it’s when President Streep tells our scientists “we aren’t going to do anything about that meteor.”)
This kind of stuff confused me tremendously for years during which I was ostensibly supposed to know what I was talking about because I was getting paid to teach it. Early on, I remember telling my students that O Brother Where Art Thou started on the inciting event because they’re already escaping from the chain gang when we start the film. After more years of practice, it was clear as day that the inciting event is when they wake up in the barn surrounded by a mob with torches.
I hope that’s helpful or interesting… I get insecure when I drift anywhere near professor mode in the movie forum. But I’m always insecure so what else is new?! :D
Back on the Banshees, I was beyond thrilled that someone finally found a proper cinematic spotlight for one of the most beautiful pieces of music on Earth.
Back in college, I had the 4AD cassette release of Le Mysteres des Voix Bulgares and took it on my study abroad semester, walking the streets and beaches of Sydney with this playing in my Walkman. Definitely one of the top 10 “soundtracks of my life” so I was in love with The Banshees of Inisherin forever right from the opening frames.
Lastly, LOL at this totally true observation:
Don’t you dare! I can’t speak for anyone else, but I love it when you post in professor mode. 90% of the movies subforum is us genre enthusiasts burbling fondly about Marvel or horror movies, so the handful of fellow nerds who can shift into “professor mode” are much appreciated. Moar plz!
Heh, thanks, Tom! I too always enjoy learning from others so I don’t know why I’m like this. Maybe it’s the word “profess.” Aren’t people who profess to know things usually full of shit? :D
What’s the significance of the banshees? I was thinking about it earlier, and it has me stumped, and I feel like I’m missing something.
Colm seems to be haunted by them.
Is there a read on this where it’s the story of Job, and the banshees are responsible for Colms malaise, and it’s all part of Padraic being tested by the banshees somehow?
There is what seems like a fakeout when the sister is leaving and there’s a banshee standing next to Padraic on the cliff, and we’re supposed to think that he’s marked for death.
They’re not just there as foreshadowing devices to build tension, are they?
Going on the list forthwith!
I guess I never took the old lady as a Banshee, but I’m terrible at this stuff. What made it all make sense was Colm in the confessional, the priest asked about his “despair” and Colm lied about it, I didn’t catch why he’s so stuck in despair, but that’s the crux of his issue. He’s given up and hates everything about his life and is externalizing that on someone who was nearby, despite him being a steady (if not terribly interesting) friend.
It’s ambiguous, because they’re not exactly supernatural beings, they’re women who are known to live on the island.
But I think as far as the banshees exist, it has to be them, right?
There are several different ones. There’s Mrs. McCormick that Padraic and his sister know. Is she a banshee? I don’t know, but she seems pretty comfortable predicting peoples deaths.
She’s not trying to be mean, she’s just trying to be accurate.
And then there’s the old lady by the lake who gestures at the sister (we think, but she’s probably waving at Dominic coming up behind her).
And the lady on the cliff that we don’t see, because she’s blurred in the background.
We don’t actually know it’s an old lady, that’s just my assumption, and how I read the sisters reaction. She smiles at Padraic, and then she turns serious when she sees the other shape next to him. Banshees are portents of death.
It could just be that they’re symbolic of Colms midlife crisis.
I also didn’t feel like they were super important to the plot, but that’s what makes me wonder if I’m just dumb. I figure there has to be some meaning there. It’s in the name of the movie, it’s the name of Colms song, and I thought he was pretty serious when he talked about them.
Interesting. My two thoughts would be that Banshees didn’t actually have to be part of it, it was the name of the song and my dumbth take is that it doesn’t necessarily have to go beyond that. The other is that Colm wasn’t having a midlife crisis, I’ve had that, he’s having a complete breakdown of despair. He’s a suicide that hasn’t worked up to the suicide, self mutilation is an extremely far point to go to to demonstrate that, but it also illustrates his reluctance to commit proper suicide, which is backed up by the later moves with the fire. Which also fits in well to an older Catholic world, where suicide is absolutely not acceptable but then, what do you do?
I like that take, but then I don’t understand what the movie was doing, because I felt like it was telling me that Colm was more or less sane.
To me that’s communicated by the people around him, who seem unnaturally calm about what he’s doing. In a sane world, he would be shipped off to hospital after the first event. In any kind of world, he would definitely be shipped off after the second.
The fact that they don’t do that, and the fact that the priest (and everyone else) talks to him like a sane person tells me he’s rational.
That’s part of my problem with the movie, at least with how I interpreted it, because if McDonagh wanted me to take Colm seriously, like the rest of the island seems to, he really should’ve held back on the extreme self-mutilation.
I also got the sense that he had some interest in living. He was taking students, playing music, serenading the ladies, and he still went to the pub. I would feel better about the suicide theory if he wasn’t partaking in those things, and maybe isolating himself more.
/edit/
He also jumped out of the window instead of staying put.
Good points, and I’m not trying to grasp any special knowledge here, but normalcy in the face of self-destruction is a pretty common thing among the poor folks and the rural folks. To the point that when someone is self-destructing it’s allowed to go on, as is their right, as weird as that might sound these days. There’s no therapy, interventions, etc. even today where I come from, it’s just “well, John has decided to drink himself to death, what are you gonna do?”
Specifically to the movie, it also makes sense, because when that person has a particular thing, like Colm’s music, you just let it go on and play itself out. All that made more sense to me that the earlier lashing out at friends.
I don’t know if we are supposed to read Colm as sane (he certainly wouldn’t be considered sane if this was real life), but most people on the island consistently refuse to acknowledge the problems around them. Like no one other than Padraic comments on Dominic being abused by his father, even when it’s stated directly to their faces, and at the end even Padraic just goes “well I guess he fell in the lake, what a totally accidental tragedy no one could have foreseen”.