[imagesource: Alamy]

Brendan Gleeson and Colin Farrell are being reunited by their In Bruges director for yet another tragicomedy.

Writer-director Martin McDonagh (also behind 2018’s Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri) has put the duo back together for his latest jet-black Irish folklore offering, The Banshees of Inisherin, which seems to be a strong contender for the Oscars’ best picture race.

“It’s an end-of-friendship breakup movie that swings between the hilarious, the horrifying and the heartbreaking in magnificent fashion,” notes The Guardian in its five-star review of the “flawless” film.

Set in 1923 on the fictional island of Inisherin, dairy farmer Pádraic (Colin Farrell) and Colm (Brendan Gleeson) are only friends because of circumstances.

Eventually, the chalk-and-cheese pair – “the former a simple soul who can talk for hours about horse poo; the latter “a thinker” who writes music, plays the fiddle and falls prey to bouts of existential despair” – are challenged by their differences:

Depressed by a sense of time slipping away, and determined to do something creative with whatever years he has left, Colm has decided to cut Pádraic out of his life, ridding himself of the “aimless chatting” of “a limited man”. “What is he, 12?” scoffs Dominic (Barry Keoghan), a local lad who harbours hopeless dreams of escaping his daddy (a brutish policeman whose hobbies are drinking and masturbation) and taking up with the bookish Siobhán (Kerry Condon). But Colm is deadly serious and makes a solemn promise, or threat: every time Pádraic talks to him, he will cut off one of his own fiddle-playing fingers.

The conflict with Colm eats away at Pádraic’s innate good nature, providing “plenty of quotable, laugh-out-loud moments” that “meld odd-couple comedy with toxic bromantic satire”.

The film was released in cinemas on Friday and judging by the trailer, it looks delightfully melancholic:

[source:guardian]