It must be a great relief for Colin Farrell to finally be in a film in which he can speak with an Irish accent. A tragi-comedy of insularity, Martin McDonagh’s The Banshees of Inisherin is set on a island off the west coast of Ireland in the 1920s. There is no actual place called Inisherin, but one assumes the director and his lead actors are familiar with what goes on in a small Irish village. This tale, at once so absurd, also has a terrible ring of reality.
The story is as simple as it is daft, with overtones of the bleak humour of Samuel Beckett. One day Pádraic (Colin Farrell), a simple-minded cattle farmer, goes to collect his mate, Colm (Brendan Gleeson), so they can take their regular stroll to the local pub and sip a Guinness or two. Colm, however, is not in his cottage.
