Why 'The Banshees of Inisherin' Should Win Best Picture
Credit: Searchlight Pictures
Greg Ehrhardt, OnScreen Blog Columnist
As OnScreen Chief Film Critic Ken Jones can attest to, I did not want to see The Banshees of Inisherin.
While I do try to be a film connoisseur, I am ultimately just a movie fan, and try to provide commentary for OnScreen Blog from a fan’s point of view. But that also means the movie’s hook has to mean something for me to take time to watch it, and the hook for The Banshees of Inisherin is not exactly, shall we say, compelling.
Here it is, according to rottentomatoes.com:
“Set on a remote island off the west coast of Ireland, THE BANSHEES OF INISHERIN follows lifelong friends Pádraic and Colm, who find themselves at an impasse when Colm unexpectedly puts an end to their friendship.”
It sounds like plot synopsis you would see for the 4th episode of the 3rd season of some historical drama on BBC.
But, after deciding to attempt to be a completist for the 2023 Best Picture nominees, I watched it, and had only one conclusion:
This is the best movie of 2023.
No, this is not a movie for the American everyman. It’s a fairly slow movie that is very depressing and sometimes hard to watch because of how terrible you feel for all of the characters of the show. But, it is a movie about mainly one thing: how easily good friendships can go bad.
I’ll get back to that later. First, let’s state the case why it’s the best movie of 2022:
1) It’s the best ensemble performance with the biggest degree of difficulty to pull off
a. The Banshees of Inisherin has 4 acting nominations: Colin Ferrell for Best Actor, Brendan Gleeson and Barry Keoghan for Best Supporting Actor, and Kerry Condon for Best Supporting Actress. With 4 nominations, Banshees joins a fairly elite company with 4 or more acting nominations; only 4 movies have ever had 5 nominations. These nominations are all well-deserved, and Ferrell gives what I think should be the Oscar winning performance as a relatable and lovable poor schmuck who breaks bad by the end of the movie.
2) Considering the location, time period, and mood of the movie, it is gorgeously and appropriately shot piece
a. With the island of Inisherin itself as a metaphor, the movie shows for how alone Padraic, his sister Siobhan, and former best friend Colm feel (as well as pretty much the rest of the characters) as they desperately seek connection with their fellow man despite a war happening around them and very little hope in their day to day lives that things will get better.
3) It is a movie that could have been made in any decade going back to the 1950s
a. I believe this will be a timeless movie due to the themes it speaks to so well that are relevant to any age demographic. The conventional wisdom of Oscar voters and movie buffs is to reward movies that are made “for the times we’re living in”.
I strongly disagree with this. The best movies are those that stay with us forever. Take the movie “Crash”, which won Best Picture in 2006. That movie, the merits of its quality aside, was very much a movie made for 2006 audiences. It’s only 16 years later, and that movie feels ancient.
Ideally, Oscar voters should select movies that never need to be dusted off because dust never gets a chance to settle due to how often it is rewatched. The Banshees of Inisherin I venture will have timeless appeal because it is fundamentally about how fragile friendships are and how it gamely sits between 3 different film genres. This brings me to the last contention for its Best Picture candidacy:
4) The Banshees of Inisherin is a horror movie dressed as a black comedy
a. That is no easy feat considering the movie is set in early 20th century Ireland. Now, despite this being billed as a comedy, I personally feel there is zero comedy in this movie, and if this is a comedy, then so is The Godfather. But this movie is arguably a horror movie, not just because of the woman in black (I won’t spoil it for those who haven’t seen it), but because of the lengths Colm (Brendan Gleeson) will go through to end a friendship.
To be intellectually honest, I don’t like making Best Picture cases based on what the movie is about, because, the logical extension is I could make a movie on an iPhone about some compelling idea, and that “movie” should be considered great because of the idea.
Execution, script, acting, and directing matters. However, the case based on the merits for The Banshees of Inisherin is made above, albeit very simply (You will read much more detailed pieces on the merits of the movie here, and better written too!). The thing though with this movie though, is this movie sticks with you, because, everyone of every gender has gone through what Padraig and Colm go through in this movie in some form.
We don’t keep every friend we make. How many friends did we make in high school or college that were either a matter of convenience or of the moment? Friends you make over, say, beer pong, won’t last unless you either play beer pong until your 70s, unless you build on that friendship with new layers of shared experiences.
Colm and Padraig of course, are stuck on the island of Inisherin, going through the same routine nearly every day. There is no new experience for them to share. For Padraig, that’s fine, but for Colm, it is not.
Usually, friendships don’t break up, they just end, mutually. But sometimes, they don’t. What rings loudest for me (and I bet for many audiences), is, Padraig is saying the quiet part out loud throughout the entire movie when he is struggling with why Colm would suddenly stop wanting to be friends. Everything Padraig is going through in dealing with a friend who suddenly wants no part of him is stuff most people just internalize.
“What’s wrong with me?”
“Is there something I can do?”
“Why did he change?”
All of this are normal feelings, but ‘The Banshees of Inisherin’ dramatizes this in such an effective way for the big screen, that when you see these internal monologues play out, seemingly normal thoughts are now horrifying when carried out to its logical destination.
Great movies make you think about your life, positively, or negatively. Great movies relate to most audiences in some form and stick with you long past the movie’s run time. Banshees stuck with me the most. In fact, here are my rankings of the Oscar nominees “stickiness” from 1-10, with 10 being it is still sticking with me as of this moment, and 1 meaning I forgot about the movie when the movie ended:
Banshees of Inisherin: 10
All Quiet on the Western Front: 9.5
Everything Everywhere All At Once: 6 (more on this later)
Top Gun Maverick: 8
Tar: 3
Elvis: 1.5
Avatar Way of Water: 0
The Fablemans: 5
(I haven’t seen Women Talking or Triangle of Sadness)
Stickiness matters, because the purpose of movies is to be unforgettable, not only viscerally, but mentally.
Banshees is a great movie because it has the best stickiness. With apologies to ‘Everything Everywhere All At Once’, a movie that is also relatable and a bit sticky due to most everyone thinking about how their life would be different with different choices made, it falls short for me because it is a bit too over-stuffed and silly to truly be profound. Sure, it’s still sticky enough to be heart-warming, and if Spielberg taught us anything, it is that to be heart-warming should be all that matters for the movies.
But in this slate of nominees, Banshees of Inisherin makes you think, and makes you weep, and considering the degree of difficulty to pull that off given the setting, it deserves the Best Picture award for 2022.