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.
The 4 rewatch keys open on this page when you choose "Seen it?".
Carry this in: Watch Farrell's face after the lines land. Everything the film knows sits there, in a man who can do nothing.