After recently watching An Cailín Ciúin, Arracht and Black ’47, I had high hopes for the Banshees of Inisherin (although mistakenly I did not watch the trailer) but after the first “feckin’”, or I should say multiple “feckins”, within the first 30 seconds of the movie, I knew I was in for a long 2 hours.
At first, it seemed we were only going to be introduced to one moron, that being Barry Keoghan’s guy, who played the biggest retard on the island. I’m not sure what accent he was trying to portray but it certainly wasn’t Irish. As time went on, we were introduced to moron after moron after moron, basically everyone on the island was retarded. Oh, apart from the sister (forget her name) who hates men, of course, and says “feckin’” in every sentence.
There are two scenes in the Confession Box, both blasphemous, one particularly awful one, where Brendan Gleeson’s character (name also forgotten) is asked by the priest if he ever has impure thoughts about men. He replies “no, have you?” which leads to the priest entering a frenzy of “fucking this and fucking that” while still in the confession box. The boomers surrounding me burst out laughing. I try to imagine what they are thinking “haha priest said f word in church haha so funny, sure didn’t the Irish go everywhere” etc. At one point, Colin Farrell’s character sees fighting of the civil war coming from the mainland. His throwaway comment “whatever it is you’re fighting over” further added to the disdain shown towards our history.
This brings me onto my next point, boomers. As I sat there looking reminiscent of the infamous Patrick Bateman gif where he’s looking down the camera with a death stare, I tried to get into the mind of the boomer. I concluded that the majority of them were laughing, not because they found it funny, but because they were told it was a comedy. If they were told it was a thriller or a horror etc. they would act accordingly. No, I will not elaborate (for now).
Back to the movie. The best way I could sum it up would be if Gaeltwitter directed a parody of what r/Ireland thinks it means to be Irish. The whole film could have been 10 minutes long, if Colin Farrell’s character (it’s not so much that I forget their names, more so I refuse to learn them) wasn’t such a capper and had have taken no for an answer. Instead, we are taking on a 2-hour journey of the most nonsensical, farfetched story you’ve ever heard.
The sense of relief I had when the movie ended has genuinely led me to forget the ending, although I remember thinking “that was a dogshit ending to an equally dogshit movie”. I can only imagine the 15-minute standing ovation this got at whatever snob film festival, was from foreigners laughing at how tic the Irish are. It’s no wonder we’re seen as a soft touch when nonsense like this is how we’re portrayed in the mainstream.
You may be thinking “why, Lanklet Dev, did you stay till the end if it was so bad?” My answer “you leave films early because you dislike them. I stay to develop my arc. We are not the same.”
P.S. if you’re looking for good Irish films, I highly recommend the 3 mentioned in the opening paragraph.
Interesting review that leads to its own questions about our feckin feckin feckin excuse for a feckin feckin arts sector. There was a recent short list to stick an unwanted statue up in St Anne’s Park near to where Heffo and Brian O’Driscoll both lives. Instead of having a statue of say both of them jumping for round and oval balls, along the lines of the Limerick hurling/rugby statue or at least something with a whiff of the area, those short listed include a Cork woman and a group of others, who were never in Ireland in their lives. Check out the transexual spider outside the Central Bank and compare and contrast it with Spain’s Central Bank, which is festooned with real art by Goya et al. Little fear of our overlords promoting genuine efforts on screen or by any other way
Thanks Lanklet Dev for the ‘heads up’, you’ve saved me two hours of suffering and a few bob. It’s just going to get worse isn’t it, I’m surprised the Island ‘Iniserin’wasn’t full of ‘Irish’ from Africa and the Middle East waving their full citizenship papers recently given out by FG/FF in one of those ridiculous ceremonies full of disinterested islamists, low iq Africans & nose picking Pakistanis waiting for voting rights in Ireland; import their full extended family under the ‘family reunification’ nonsense and full entitlment to move freely anywhere in the EU. But hey, at least the fully vaxed Boomers were laughing away the remainder of the country their ancestors suffered so terribly to preserve through centuries of jealousy degredation and violence.
What’s with all the hating on elderly people who you keep referring to as boomers? You sound like an entitled 18 year old who’s perpetually angry at his parents for showing him that his half baked student ideologies don’t stand up in the face of reality. Have some respect for the generation of people who worked hard to build this country and took it from a third world Island that everybody wanted to leave to a first rate country that people are proud to now call their home. Perhaps if you got a real job instead of wasting your time typing bullshit articles from your bedroom in your Mammy and Daddy’s house you would understand how a whole generation pushed through adversity and difficulty so that you could have free healthcare, generous social welfare, and practically free education.