The message “be kind to others” is certainly one that may feel beaten down. It is one of the first lessons we are taught in grade school and has been a cliché in many stories we’ve grown up with. However, just this year, two polar opposite films delivered this message on the big screen. While one of the two expanded past our known universe to explore the yin-yang relationship of love and despair, The Banshees of Inisherin (2022) only has to bring us across the pond to Ireland to tell us how seeing kindness as unnecessary can birth cycles of pride and hate.

The black comedy written and directed by Martin McDonagh follows Pádric (portrayed by Colin Farrell) after his lifelong friend Colm (portrayed by Brendan Gleeson) reveals that he no longer likes him, without any given reason or warrant. This proclamation by Colm leads to Pád’s curiosities, stubbornness, and pettiness on both ends and eventually escalates into their own personal civil war.

McDonagh has never pulled punches with his bleak landscapes riddled with moral ambiguity and divisive comedy, and his fourth feature may be the most delivering under this description. The 1920s Irish island of Insherin covers the bleakness of this setting with ease, but the ambiguity and questions this film begs require a much deeper dive. 

The Banshees of Inisherin deals with themes of friendship and connection as a whole. The reasoning behind Colm’s newfound dislike for Pád isn’t revealed until about a third of the way through the film’s runtime. During an argument in their local pub (a place where many qualms begin and end), Colm admits that he had broken off their friendship because he wants his life to be about more than dull conversations and wants to be remembered.

From this point on, their relationship is much more than a fallout between two friends but now a decision between our present and future. Their fight now is one between whether we should focus on our legacy after we die and our want for some permanence to our existence or if we should focus on being kind to those near to us, however small and fleeting that circle may be.

Colm’s choice to focus on the future so much that it neglects the people who care about him in the present ignites a cycle of fighting, fighting that leads to self-infliction and self-infliction that leads to harm to each other’s families and homes. Each escalating action is justified in each of their minds and is seen as retribution for the other’s actions.

With each justification sounding more and more like ones you’d hear in a petty playground fight, we are left in the theaters asking ourselves: Are we really this petty in our lives? Are we, as logical human beings, able to succumb to such pride that we would cut off our own hand and doom ourselves not to be able to play the violin that we wanted to play just because we said so? And are we really so stubbornly blind that we would cause someone we care about pain and dismemberment because they just won’t be my friend?

In Banshees, the answer lies just across a body of water for them, where a civil war rages throughout the entirety of the film. We may not see what they’re fighting about, but it could be just as senseless and caused by the same masculine pride and stubbornness that fuel Pádric and Colm.

The humor lies within the tragedy revealed in hindsight that this war between them never came from a place of hate or wrong-doing. We see instances of Colm aiding Pádric up after being beaten down and giving him a ride back to town. He even knocks out an abusive police officer for insulting his former friend. Colm may have found Pádric dull and have been sick of him, but never once did he really hate him. Rather than hate, all of this fighting started with the choice of not caring for the people around us. It is important to note that Colm’s choice for apathy, though creating the cycle of hate that would follow, was never seen as malicious. Looking at his first conversation with the priest in the confessional, when confronted on his decision, he defends himself, asking that “[not being nice is] not a sin, is it, Father”.  To Colm, and many of us, not being good doesn’t equate to being bad. However, every event that occurs from there builds into a cautionary tale for how this choice is more harmful to us than we’d guess.

Despite all of what has occurred, this vicious cycle created by apathy is left with a small glimmer of hope created by sympathy. When Pád seeks vengeance for his donkey, he targets Colm’s house and even expresses a passive threat on his life, but he decides to leave Colm’s sheepdog out of the mix and even takes him in after believing it was all he had left of his rival. After losing his own beloved animal, the last thing he’d wish for would be to go after Colm’s, even though his Confusious “eye-for-an-eye” logic would call for such. And after the ash from Colm’s home had settled, the two surprisingly reunited on the shores of Inisherin. There, they profess that this is not over, but when walking away, Colm thanks Pád for watching over his dog moments before the credits roll.

There lie several potential meanings to take from this final scene. Are they friends again? Will the bickering continue? Did Pád prove to Colm that he was not as dull as he believed him to be, and earn his respect? I think no matter which is true, what the takeaway here is that amongst the fighting and acts of hate, a small act of kindness and compassion occurred, one that may create a new cycle, or at least end a cycle causing harm.

As stated earlier, The Banshees of Inisherin is not the first and only film to take on such a simple topic as kindness and run with it in a direction you wouldn’t expect. Just last March, Everything Everywhere All At Once swept film discourse as the maximalist action comedy by the Daniels that, while living up to the name, boils down to a mother-daughter story fueled by the tool that is kindness and compassion. While the execution of these films could not differ more, they seem to have similar core values. It is not limited to just these two films, though. Revisiting Banshees’s inquiry on whether we should care about the community around us, one could even draw comparisons to another A24 release of Marcel the Shell with Shoes On. 

So why has 2022 been the year for a call to compassion and learning to be kind? I think the answer lies in how both films recognize how their protagonists lose sight of such a simple task along the way. Colm strays from caring for the people directly in front of him during his crisis of realizing how big the world truly is and that he could easily be forgotten by it. This does not stray far from Evelyn (portrayed by Michelle Yeoh) in Everything Everywhere All at Once, who gets so caught up in the multiverse that she loses track of the life she has back in her own universe. I think what these films are saying goes much further than being kind, but that within our modern existentialism, it is easy to forget the simplicity of treating each other as human and having sympathy for the people around us.

This wave of commentary on our society is no coincidence either. It makes perfect sense how this kind of meaning should be found after the 2020 pandemic and with so much happening in our world right now. Additionally, the commentary towards a loss of community values and focus more on the future than the present could derive just as easily from the rise of digital communication now becoming our default.

No matter which, The Banshees of Inisherin, along with many other great films this year, has come just at the right time. Whether we are like Colm, who needs to learn that trying to become great shouldn’t require neglecting the good, or whether we are like Pád, who needs a spark to achieve surpassing the dull, McDonagh does seem to urge that we find out which we are not through bickering, pettiness, and pride, but though kindness instead.

Hear more about The Banshees of Inisherin on Episode 012 of The Rolling Tape!

Review Courtesy of Eugene Rocco Utley