Friends disunited

Thankfully, I was forewarned, but Martin McDonagh's The Banshees Of Inisherin is a particularly tough watch for a middle-aged man. What initially appears to be a comic commentary on mismatched male friendships and men's pettiness, pigheadedness and inarticulacy becomes much darker as the feud between former pub-going pals Padraic (Colin Farrell) and Colm (Brendan Gleeson) slowly but steadily escalates with awful inexorability to a dramatic climax.

Perhaps it's just personal experience, but over the last three years, periods of lockdown and the switch to online interaction seem to have done strange things, warping some friendships and wrecking others beyond repair. Despite being someone who hates losing touch with people, I couldn't bear to stay on Facebook to witness the rule-flouting antics and (even worse) the conspiracy theories of friends and acquaintances who (I would have hoped) had more sense.

In the film, it was social isolation on the fictional Irish island of Inisherin that actually brought Padraic and Colm together - but the latter has now come to decide that their friendship has been merely a marriage of convenience and that the pair have nothing in common, beyond a love of Guinness. Padraic is a good-natured, decent sort of chap, a man who needs someone to talk with - or rather at. His bewilderment and hurt at being so brutally cut off by someone he considered a close confidant made me wince.

And yet Colm's reasoning was equally resonant. Acutely aware of how his life is slipping away, he resolves not to spend any more time listening to Padraic's amiable but vacuous chat. Like Colm, I too have found myself looking at the shrinking horizon and starting to dwell on what might remain after my time is done. Legacy is too grand a word for it, but I think we all worry whether anything we do or achieve in life will have any lasting impact. In that respect, The Banshees Of Inisherin is poignant and heartbreaking.

But I don't want to give the impression that the film is unremittingly bleak. On the contrary, there are plenty of moments that had me howling (not least the confessional scenes), often due to the pitch-perfect bare-bones dialogue.

The scenery and cinematography are stunning, and McDonagh's decision to bring Farrell and Gleeson back together, 14 years after they starred in his debut In Bruges, pays handsome dividends.

That said, the show is arguably stolen by one of the excellent supporting cast, Barry Keoghan. If you want to know why he won a BAFTA, just watch the lakeside scene that his character Dominic shares with Padraic's sister Siobhan (Kerry Condon). Remarkable - as is the film itself.