Colin Farrell

I watched a tragedy the other day. It got under my skin. Its characters wouldn’t let me be. But I was also a bit sorry I’d seen it. A friend used a perfect word for it: grim.

The film, The Banshees of Inisherin, is being called a black comedy, and some strange critics are calling it hilarious.

Hilarious?????

I love black comedies. I will howl at Shaun of the Dead and Serial Mom and Dr. Strangelove. But what Martin McDonagh’s new film makes me want to do is weep.

Have we forgotten Yorick in Hamlet? Or the dying Mercutio’s quip in Romeo and Juliet, “Ask for me tomorrow, and you shall find me a grave man”? Moments of humor do not make a tragedy a comedy. They highlight and accentuate the tragedy, make us feel for those who’ve suffered and make our sense of their losses heavier, more acute.

If you want to tell a story about a friend dying in the hospital, you don’t ONLY show that friend in the hospital. You show her lively and funny and nimble—help us see the distance between her then and now. Otherwise, all we audience members feel is a kind of generic sadness. We don’t think of your friend as an individual. We don’t understand the extent of the loss of this one amazing human being.

The Banshees of Inisherin is—on the surface–about the demise of a friendship for trivial reasons. But what it shows is how little it takes for one simple, everyday man’s life to spiral, for his days to go from easygoing to heartbreaking. And how that change brings out the worst in him. (The story is also a rather obvious metaphor about pointless warfare.)

I find Martin McDonagh’s work fascinating. I agree that many of his films are black comedies. But not this film. It’s not ridiculous and theatrical or over the top in the way Seven Psychopaths or In Bruges or even Three Billboards and other black comedies are. The story is too simple, and the pain of Padraic’s (Colin Farrell’s) now broken life is far too minutely and intimately told for the humor to do anything but make us feel for his losses. (And yes, his friend’s actions are over the top, but so are Romeo’s.)

If you want to see just how talented Farrell is, watch the movie. If you’re in the mood for a sad tale about the destructiveness of poor decisions, watch.

But don’t view this film on one of your vacation days, like I did. And stop listening to those critics who think a few jokes make something a comedy.

If you want to weep afterward, it’s not a comedy.