The Banshees of Inisherin · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

The camera holds on Colin Farrell's face a beat too long. Colm has just told him — flatly, no row, no reason that survives daylight — that he doesn't like him any more, and Pádraic stands working the words over the way you'd worry a sore tooth. He grins, because surely it's a joke. It isn't. The shot doesn't cut to an action, because there is no action to cut to. That stranded face, baffled and going nowhere, is the whole film in miniature. It is also a small, exact lesson in what happens to a movie when its hero loses the power to do anything about what he sees.

Deleuze called the engine of classical cinema the sensory-motor link: a character perceives a situation and acts to change it. Perception flows into action, action resolves the situation, the cut serves the chain. Pursue, rescue, win, lose. Pádraic lives entirely inside that older film — he is a decent man whose whole equipment for living is doing the next ordinary thing, calling for his friend at two o'clock, walking to the pub. The cruelty of Banshees is that it hands him a situation no ordinary thing can touch. "I just don't like you no more" admits no proportionate response. This is what Deleuze named the crisis of the action-image: the moment characters can no longer react adequately to what they perceive, and the sturdy circuit of situation-and-act goes slack. McDonagh stages it as farce, because the gap between cause and consequence is so absurd it can only be funny — until it's severed fingers and a burning cottage.

With the action stripped out, what's left is pure looking and listening. Deleuze's word is opsigns and sonsigns — pure optical and sound situations, where a character (and we, with him) can only behold. Pádraic becomes a watcher, an endurer: a seer rather than an agent. The film's most charged scenes are not events but witnessings — Pádraic outside Colm's window hearing the fiddle through the wall, Pádraic at the pub absorbing a blow he cannot return. Editor Mikkel Nielsen makes this the cutting's signature: he holds on the reaction after the line lands, letting silence carry what an older film would have discharged into a punch or a plan. That held close-up is the affection-image — feeling registered on a face but not yet released into act — and at its purest a qualisign, the immobile reflecting face expressing one steady quality. Here the quality is bewildered hurt, and Farrell can sustain it for an unbearable length without a flicker of explanation.

This patience is inherited, and worth naming. The two-person scene held on withdrawal across long silence is Bergman's instrument — Scenes from a Marriage, Autumn Sonata — and McDonagh transposes it wholesale into the pub booth, just as Nichols transposed Albee in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, preserving the rhythm of theatrical acts and treating dialogue itself as the weapon. The long unhurried scene that goes nowhere on purpose is what Deleuze called dead time (temps mort) — duration held for its own weight, the everyday refusing to advance the plot. The genius stroke is tonal, and it's Carter Burwell's. The same sparse melodic logic he brought to Fargo lets the film hold comedy and irreversible grief in the same chord without either collapsing the other. The disproportion stays funny and stays devastating, which is the precise emotional shape of a stalled sensory-motor circuit.

Then there is the war you never see. The Irish Civil War reaches Inisherin only as sound — faint cannon across the water, an atmospheric constant. Deleuze would point to the open whole: the framed quarrel of two men opens, through that out-of-field rumble, onto a larger changing totality it can't contain. The petty feud and the national one rhyme without a single cut between them; the island's smallness presses the characters together while history dismantles itself off-screen. Davis shoots the cliffs and the sky filling two-thirds of the frame so that the men are dwarfed by an indifferent whole — landscape as the absolute that their grievance keeps failing to matter to.

That landscape is also where the film argues with its ancestors. McDonagh and Davis cite The Quiet Man exactly — the same Connemara stone walls, the same two-shot of male rivalry staged across a low wall — and then invert it. Ford resolved masculine conflict into pastoral reconciliation; Banshees resolves it into ash and amputation. The Field's rural Irishman who'll destroy himself over land becomes Colm, destroying himself over a fiddle tune meant to outlast him. The inheritance is named so the betrayal of it can register.

What did McDonagh actually invent? Not a new image — the crisis of the action-image was diagnosed sixty years before him. His move was to make it popular: to take the European cinema of existential impasse, the watcher who cannot act, and smuggle it inside a film that is genuinely, frequently hilarious and that earned nine Oscar nominations. He proved the stalled seer could anchor a crowd-pleaser. Watch it again for Farrell's face in the doorway. Everything the film knows is already there, in a man who perceives perfectly and can do nothing at all.