If you missed out on seeing The Banshees of Inisherin on the big screen, you’re in luck, as Martin McDonagh’s latest drama movie is now available to watch for free if you have a subscription to the streaming service Disney Plus.
The dark comedy movie reunites In Bruges co-stars Colin Farrell and Brendan Gleeson with McDonagh, and takes place at the tail end of the civil war in Ireland in 1923. Farrell plays the “nice but dull” Pádraic Súilleabháin, who slowly unravels after his lifelong friend Colm Doherty (Gleeson) abruptly decides he no longer wants to be friends with him anymore. Instead, he wants to devote the rest of his life entirely to making music and forging a legacy for himself.
The pair’s rift soon grows increasingly out of control, and contends with themes like loneliness, ego, death, and depression in a post-Famine Ireland.
Speaking to Jamie Lee Curtis for Variety‘s Directors on Directors, Farrell explained, “The film was about two friends falling out. Literally one lad saying to another lad, ‘I don’t want to be your friend anymore.’ Today’s culture, you don’t bother sending a text — I believe the kids call it ‘ghosting’ — you just cut the person out. Hard to do that on an island where there’s one pub and one church.”
“I understood my character, Pádraic, and where he’s coming from. But I felt such a deep sympathy for the struggle of Brendan’s character and for the lengths that he had to go to find this peace, this solitude, so that he could reckon with his own mortality.”
With a rare 97% consensus on Rotten Tomatoes, the Disney Plus movie has become an Academy Awards favourite, with the performances of supporting cast members like Barry Keoghan and Kerry Condon also being widely praised. The Banshees of Inisherin also got a total of eight Golden Globe nominations including Best Motion Picture, Best Director, Best Screenplay, and Best Actor for Farrell, Gleeson, Condon, and Keoghan.
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