Review: In buddy breakup drama 'The Banshees of Inisherin,' all's Farrell in love and war
It's hardly an original insight to note that "The Banshees of Inisherin," Martin McDonagh's caustic and mournful new movie, is also his latest work to give its location top billing. Longtime admirers of this British-Irish writer-director's stage work know his fondness for regionally specific titles like "The Cripple of Inishmaan" and "The Lieutenant of Inishmore," two plays that — together with this film — form a loosely connected trilogy, tied together not by common characters but by common ground. If character is destiny in McDonagh's work, then both are also inextricably tied to location and landscape. Here, as before, he draws us into an insular Irish enclave, where the air is thick with salty insults and bitter laughs, and cruelty seems to well up from the soil like highly acidic groundwater.
Which is not to
