I have just seen the movie and this is what I think about it.
The action takes place in an Ireland’s West Coast villaje called Inisherin and tells us the story of a friendship, or better than that, all the opposite, this is to say the end of it. Despite all what I had heard from my classmates, who had seen the movie before me, I have to confess that I liked it, because is more than I had expected.
In my opinión, it is quite difficult that a whole life friendship can finish suddenly when nothing has happened between two persons and that’s with it is so incredible. The plot is simple but I have enjoyed the actor’s performance and the views of so many beautiful places. It’s, no doubt, a strange film which not all the people can understand or like, but I liked it a lot.
Colm and Pádraic are two old friends and both are living in the same village, a beautiful landscape with beaches and cliffs but however a poor land where the people earn their living working on the fields and taking care of animals, such as cows, goats and sheeps, besides of the fishing.
The year, which I could see in a wall’s calendar, is 1923, that is to say at the end of the Irish Civil War. Pádraic is a poor, quiet, good man although a bit ignorant who lives with his sister Siobhán and a miniature black donkey called Jenny in a cabin among stone hedges and meadows, with a horse and two or three cows.
Siobhán, nevertheless is the most clever woman or man in the village, I think, because she reads books and realizes that the life can be more than living in poverty, but she’s taking care of her brother and dreaming of with a better life in the great island.
Colm seems a lonely man who also lives in a cabin with his dog, but on the beach, a pretty place surrounded by mountains. Normally he is playing the fiddle and composing traditional music which he after plays in the pub with several more musics. He has no family, only his guy Pádraic, so it is very strange that one day, without an apparent reason, he meets Pádraic and says to him that he doesn’t want continue being his friend.
At the begining this behavior is imposible to believe, because your friendship is ancient, but Colm says to Pádraic that he doesn’t want him to talk and if he does, he will cut himself a finger on his left hand, the hand which he plays the fiddle with. Pádraic is very confused and try to get a reason for that rare situation looking for him in the roads and finnally in his own house.
One day, after they have been talking, Colm goes to his friend’s house and throw a finger which he has cut himself against the door and returns home. Pádraic is, in my opinión, a sensitive man that doesn’t have more friends, so he feels very sad, confused and abandoned and he can’t understand what is happening, and he
sometimes meets Dominic, the policeman’s son, a young man worse than Pádraic because he seems a bit fool and start to talk trying to find a solution that it seems doesn’t exist.
As Pádraic continues talking with Colm and he refuses to do it, they don’t go to the pub together and finally one day Colm cuts himself the last four fingers that remain on his left hand and throw them again in front of the cabin. When Pádraic arrives to home discover that Jenny the donkey has death chocked on, Colm’s fingers, so he digs a pit in order to bury it.
Then he tells Colm that on Sunday after the mass, he’ll go to his house to burn it and gives him a piece of advice: take your dog out, but you can stay inside. As a revenge Pádraic sets the house on fire.
This is, in my opinión, a dark, sad history that finnally ends in a bad way, because it’s very hard, to understand, neither for me, why a man as Colm decides to sacrifice his hand and with it his love for the music senseless action. What is Colm running off from.?
At last, the only good thing in the film is that Siobhán gets a job out of the village, moving to the Great Island and in this way she can start a new life far of the obsessive pressure of their inhabitants.
By the way, an old woman in the village called Mrs. Mc Cormick who walks alone by the paths I think is the one Banshee of the film, because she announces the Dominic’s death and another one, maybe Jenny, the donkey.
P.D.- This entry was revised and corrected before by my teacher Maite Medina. Lots of thanks!.
