The Banshees of Inisherin (2022, Martin McDonagh) (Patreon)

83/100

[NOTE: If you've somehow made it this far without learning the film's logline, I encourage you to avoid reading what follows, or anything else, prior to viewing. While there aren't really any spoilers per se—virtually everything that I'm so glad not to have known in advance can be found in the trailer—it'll be more "fun" to take the journey as intended. Can't be quite the same if you're waiting for it.]

The year's most hilarious film and its most despairing, very frequently at the same time. McDonagh has allegorical designs here and makes them altogether too plain, setting the action in 1923 and having characters repeatedly refer to the civil war raging on the mainland; I'd have preferred much less of that and no explanation at all of the film's title, which had been getting funnier and funnier as matters intensified. (I'd also like to propose retitling Tin Men as The Daemons of Baltimore.) On a denotative rather than connotative level, though, this is a stunner, diving headlong into some of humanity's deepest existential pits—"Am I wasting my life?" "Am I so useless that I'm wasting other people's lives?"—and emerging with belly laughs rooted in raw honesty and bloody grotesquerie. Colin Farrell perfectly embodies a lovable, flummoxed nonentity, making Pádraic the epitome of willful inertia; it had never once occurred to him that there might be more to life than pints down the pub of an afternoon, and Colm's insistence that there is clearly unnerves him (and Siobhán, eventually) to a degree that only heightens the pain of rejection. Gleeson's role is necessarily a bit more constricted, mostly evincing grim determination, but Colm's residual affection for Pádraic keeps sneaking through cracks in the armor, which makes it that much more horrific when he honors the terms of the agreement he unilaterally imposed. And then you've got Kerry Condon casually being a marvel of incredulous exasperation throughout, except when tenderness is called for and bestowed. I'm making Banshees sound deadly serious, because it very much is, but that's underneath a layer of verbal wit worthy of '30s screwball; McDonagh's return to Ireland yields nonstop treasures in dialogue, and I do wish that I currently had access to the precise wording of Barry Keoghan's village idiot ruminating on a stick he finds with a hook at the end of it, which he concludes was probably intended for hooking things that are the length of a stick away. Smart move, too, offsetting the screenplay's fundamental theatricality by shooting on a distractingly gorgeous island, thereby emphasizing how physically as well as socially circumscribed these people's lives are. I may yet see a more entertaining movie this year, or one that's more profound, but I don't expect to see those qualities conjoined with such consummate skill again for a while.