Martin McDonagh always promises the unexpected. What’s surprising when you watch The Banshees Of Inisherin, his first film since the Oscar-nominated Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri five years ago, is that it’s both a reunion and the story of a break-up.

Set in 1923, at the tail end of the brief but bloody Irish civil war, the black comedy, The Banshees Of Inisherin brings the director back together with the two stars of his 2008 breakout film, In Bruges – Colin Farrell and Brendan Gleeson.

In the previous film they played two very different men, both hitmen, who find themselves on common ground while hiding out in the picturesque Belgian city after a botched job.

This time, the opposite happens: Padraic (Farrell) is shocked when his old drinking buddy Colm (Gleeson) decides to shut him out of his modest but happy life – and on a lonely island, that really means something. Colm’s reason is simple but devastating: “I just don’t like you no more.”

“I wanted to tell a break-up story,” McDonagh told Vanity Fair. “This is about things getting inexorably worse from a simple, sad starting point. I wanted to make something that someone who likes In Bruges would go with, but that could be a little more, at least at the outset, odder or weirder – and definitely something different.”

Banshees follows his recent Tony-winning success on Broadway with a revival of his ’60s-set British death-penalty drama Hangmen, a Pinter-esque reflection on life and mortality. Despite the seriousness of the subject, McDonagh tapped a rich seam of unexpected, dark comedy – a trademark of his work across film and theatre and a key feature of the new film. 

Something that separates his stage work from his film work, however, is the importance of location. “In In Bruges,” he once said, “Bruges is almost a character, and in Three Billboards… the Missouri road that we found, and the small town, is a character too. Neither of those films could be a play.” Likewise, in The Banshees Of Inisherin, the rugged landscapes of rural Ireland make a perfect fictional setting for McDonagh’s characters, a reminder of the Aran Islands he visited as a kid and the stark landscape that haunted him, striking a chord with “the wildness and the loneliness of it”. 

Towering over that backdrop, though, are two fine actors. After the embarrassment of riches offered by both Seven Psychopaths (whose impeccable cult cast included Tom Waits and Christopher Walken) and Three Billboards, which won an Oscar for its star, Frances McDormand, and her co-star Sam Rockwell, McDonagh has cut things back, using a small, less starry ensemble, including Barry Keoghan (memorably devilish in The Killing Of A Sacred Deer) who plays a local policeman’s son, and Better Call Saul’s Kerry Condon as Pádraic’s smart sister Siobhán. 

The Banshees Of Inisherin walks that fine line between comedy and tragedy peppered by the sort of inventive barbed dialogue we’ve come to expect from McDonagh, even if he continues to insist that “it is my quietest movie”. 

Damon Wise