To be nice or to be great

Spoiler Alert: The review contains about as many spoilers as you’d typically find by watching the movie’s trailer. With that said, grab some popcorn 🍿 and let’s dive right into Inisherin.

All of us have encountered that one person in our lives whom we desperately attempt to distance ourselves from, yet they persistently try to reintegrate themselves into our lives, for better or for worse. However, I believe only a select few go to the extreme of threatening to sever their own fingers off if they ever encounter the other person again.

Well, meet Colm and Pádraic. Colm played by Brendan Gleeson (Mad-Eye Moody in Harry Potter!!) is a fiddler who has dreams that haven’t been realized, dreams that lay far beyond the claustrophobic and remote lands of Inisherin. Filmed on Inishmore, a small island near the director’s parents home, the movie is breathtakingly beautiful. And when it is not, it still manages to take your breath away, but this time through splashes of gore and violence.

Pádraic’s entry is accompanied by cherubic music, the sort that you would usually hear in a Disney movie, sparking off curiosity and a child-like wonder. According to Cartell Burwell, the composer was reading the Grimms’ fairy tale version of Cinderella to his 11-year-old daughter, where the step-sisters mutilated their feet to fit into the glass slipper. Burwell drew inspiration from this fairy tale due to Colm’s threat. For me, the music evoked memories of Harry Potter. It also mirrored the progression of the Harry Potter films in the way that they just kept getting darker.

The town is eerily silent. It’s a small town, anything and everything slips through everyone’s ears by the end of the day. However, the music conveys the sensation that there’s so much simmering beneath the surface of this small, “ordinary” town. For one, the characters are brilliantly written. These are individuals we’ve undoubtedly encountered in our own lives, Dominic - the town “dullard” who keeps making everybody uncomfortable with his very existence, Mrs McCormick - the eye that sees everything and quite often a comic relief (I have to add, some of my favorite spit-take moments of the film involved Mrs McCormick) and Mrs O’Riordan - the annoyingly, intrusive lady who thinks it’s everyone’s job to bring her entertainment in the form of “news”. What’s truly remarkable is how these characters’ are exaggerated to the point of almost being unbelievable, yet the phenomenal acting glosses your entire brain over.

Every single character on the island is seemingly ordinary, but each one of them are layered souls- Dominic, somehow is the only person shrewd enough to make observations everybody else misses even though everyone thinks he is dumb. Siobhan (considered to be weird and boring) shouts at Colm saying- “You are all fecking boring” when Colm complains about Pádraic’s incessantly boring commentary about the things he found in his donkey’s excrement.

Speaking of donkeys, the animals in the movie truly stole the show. The little doggo’s valiant attempt to make off with Colm’s shears and the horse’s comforting presence when something unfortunate happens to Pádraic is truly tear jerking. Interestingly, Colin Farrell, the actor portraying Pádraic, had some remarkable real-life encounters with his animal co-stars. He was bitten by Morse the dog, kicked in the knee by Jenny the donkey, and nearly reversed off a cliff by Minnie the horse, all of which were captured on film for potential DVD bonus features. Fun fact: Jenny the donkey also had her own emotional support animal - Rosie, the donkey!

During a conversation with NFS, Ben Davis the DP of the film said that to shoot those bewitching window shots, they had to use polarisers and specific lighting to capture the shots perfectly. If you don’t know what I am talking about at this moment, you will instantly when you watch the movie because the magical cinematography is hard to miss.

During the first scene, the smoke from Colm’s chimney almost appears to perfectly blend into the low hanging clouds of Inisherin. Pádraic storms out of his house when Siobhan asks him if he ever feels lonely and at the very moment, you can see Siobhan’s lonely reflection in the cracked mirror. There were some moments in the film which had me feverishly praying for some sanity (in between Colm’s coldness and Pádraic’s nonsense) and Siobhan comes through in those moments. As the feud gets more and more intense and you are sitting at the edge of your seat with your hands covering your eyes, Siobhan reminds us that at the end of the day these 2 men are in a petty fight about nothing. And when she laments over whether all her books would fit in her suitcase, story of our lives, Siobhan, the story of our fecking lives!

The film at one point discusses the “niceness debate”. Pádraic tells Colm that he is a nice guy who has been nice to everyone all his life and that has to count for something, right? To which Colm replies that niceness doesn’t last, but music, poetry, paintings and art does. We see Colm’s desperation- he feels that his relationship with Pádraic is impeding him from becoming all that he should be but at the same time, Pádraic’s words-

I don’t give a feck about Mozart. Or Borvoven. Or any of them funny name feckers. I’m Pádraic Súilleabháin. And I’m nice.

are simple and stubborn but beautifully clear. In this movie, I saw 2 men struggling to communicate their anger and yet, doing it by a single glance of an eye because I guess, there are somethings there is no moving on from.