The Banshees of Inisherin
I saw The Banshees of Inisherin in theaters yesterday and greatly enjoyed myself. I recommend it highly! Starring Colin Farrell and Brendan Gleeson (among others), the film takes place in a remote, pastoral part of Ireland with the Irish Civil War as a backdrop. But it's really about the people living on this island; their relationships, their lifestyle, and their internal conflicts. It's character-driven, personal, intimate, funny, surreal, shocking, troubling, and thought-provoking. The dialogue is fantastic and the narrative dramatic. You could do a lot of interesting thematic analysis about the plot and setting, but I don't want to spoil anything.
If you're the kind of person who likes movie trailers, you can watch the official one on YouTube. However, I think contemporary trailers take away from the natural revelations of a story. It's more interesting to go into this one more or less blind.
I haven’t seen it yet, though I’ve heard a lot about it, and I’m looking forward to watching it and seeing it win awards in a few months.
Just out of curiosity, as I’ve heard it’s kind of a downer, did you feel depressed at all?
I'm reluctant to describe the movie too singularly because it's layered both with humorous and sobering themes. The striking thing is that you'll feel both emotions about the same scene or line of dialogue. Hilarity bleeds into seriousness and vice versa, much like it can in real life, in such a way as to feel almost "surreal." Any existential confusion the characters feel is shared by the audience—you laugh at an absurd statement because how else do you even respond to something like that? The film engages you by demonstrating how its characters come to terms with the contradictory ideals set forth in the conflict(s) it presents.
To answer your question—did The Banshees of Inishiren make me feel depressed? Well, my takeaway was not that "this film accelerates the loss of meaning, value, and purpose in my life" (which was how I reacted, for example, to Murakami's Norwegian Wood). I was solemn when I walked out of the theater, not an empty void. But I did empathize with the figures on screen, some of whom very well did feel that way at times. The movie has intense, heavy, and certainly sad moments. The central premise is at first perplexing and then increasingly unsettling. Depending on how you interpret the plot in regard to the other themes of the film and in regard to your own life, you might cast its conclusion as "depressing" or "distressing" or perhaps "enlightening" or even (in an interior, esoteric sort of way) "inspiring."
More than depress you, it might just as well reveal something insightful about love, community, opportunity, hope, and unity. But it might also make you feel that life is hopeless and cruel, that people are impossible to understand, and that your interiority is similarly obscure. Maybe it'll give you a bit of both.