Sightlines · how to watch
How to watch The Banshees of Inisherin
2022 · Martin McDonagh · The Banshees of Inisherin on Sightlines
5 things to watch and listen for on a first viewing, without spoilers, and 4 more once you have seen it. Each names something you can see or hear, the pattern it belongs to, and what noticing it gives you. How these keys work.
On a first viewing
Watch how long the camera stays on Farrell's face after a line. (cutting)
Nielsen holds the reaction instead of cutting to what happens next. Farrell keeps working the words over, grinning, then not grinning, with nothing to do about them.
Payoff: You are watching a man who understands everything and can act on none of it. In the reading: icon of quality (qualisign). The reading calls that held face a qualisign: one steady feeling, bewildered hurt, sitting on screen without being discharged into action.
Listen for the faint thuds carrying across the water from the mainland. (sound)
The Irish Civil War is never shown. It arrives only as distant cannon fire, a low constant under the pub talk and the wind.
Payoff: Two men wrecking each other on a small island sit inside a country doing the same thing, unseen. In the reading: the Open. The reading calls this the Open: an offscreen rumble opens the small quarrel onto a bigger world the frame cannot hold.
Notice how much sky and cliff Davis puts around the men outdoors. (camera)
Wide shots give two-thirds of the frame to sky and stone walls running to the sea. Then interiors clamp down, faces picked out of dark rooms.
Payoff: The landscape does not care about the argument, and the film keeps showing you that it doesn't.
Listen for where Colm's fiddle is: through a wall, or in the room. (sound)
Gleeson's playing is recorded with documentary care. Sometimes Pádraic stands outside hearing it muffled. Sometimes he is inside with it. The distance keeps changing.
Payoff: The friendship's standing is told to you by acoustics before anyone says a word about it.
Watch who sits where in the pub booth and who stands at the doorway. (staging)
McDonagh, a playwright first, fixes people in the same positions scene after scene. The pub bench, the cottage threshold, the road between farms. Small deviations feel like assaults.
Payoff: Because the positions are fixed, a man sitting in the wrong seat becomes an event.
Once you have seen it
Track the size of each act against the size of its cause. (structure)
One sentence sets everything off. Fingers, a donkey, a burning cottage follow. Each escalation makes sense from inside and none of it fits what started it.
Payoff: The mismatch between cause and consequence is the subject, not a flaw in the plotting. In the reading: crisis of the action-image. The reading names this the crisis of the action-image: nothing Pádraic could sensibly do would answer what he's been told.
Watch Gleeson's hands and shoulders whenever Colm refuses to explain. (performance)
Gleeson plays withdrawal, not spite. He turns away, keeps his voice level, holds his bow. The cruelty reads as a decision he has already finished making.
Payoff: Seen twice, Colm stops being a villain and becomes a man rationing the time he has left.
Follow Mrs. McCormick. Note where she enters the frame and when she vanishes. (staging)
Flitton is staged at the edges, arriving with a death remark and leaving without explanation. She never behaves like the naturalistic neighbors around her.
Payoff: She belongs to a different kind of play than the one everyone else thinks they're in.
Notice which scenes have firelight in them and which stay gray. (light)
Davis holds the island to Atlantic greens and stone grays. Warm interior light shows up only where people are briefly connected, then drains back out.
Payoff: The palette keeps a tally of how much company anyone still has.
Carry this in: Watch Farrell's face after the lines land. Everything the film knows sits there, in a man who can do nothing.