"Maybe he just doesn't like you no more." --Siobhan Súilleabháin

"Some things there's no moving on from. And I think that's a good thing." --Padráic Suilleabháin

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It wasn't the best movie I ever saw. But it got under my skin right quick and it's going to stay awhile. I can feel it itching. 

An island off Ireland, 1923. Padráic (Colin Ferrell, the character's name is pronounced POUR-ick, with a tiny bit of a roll to the r) is a amiable simpleton of a dairy farmer. Colm (Brendan Gleeson) is his lifelong friend and polar opposite, a melancholy fiddler who muses on existential themes. The two friends meet at the pub nearly every day at two for a pint and chatter, until one day Colm decides he's got better things to do with his life than listen to the same dull, meaningless chit-chat, and he tells this to Padráic in no uncertain terms. Except to Padráic, none of the terms are certain. Nothing makes sense. How can my friend think I'm dull? He didn't think that yesterday. (He did -- you get the sense he's been thinking that for years -- but never said anything.) Padráic persists, so Colm makes the terms even more certain: every time the young man speaks so much as a single word to him, Colm will cut off one of his fingers with a pair of sheep shears. 

All this plays out in the first fifteen or twenty minutes, and as a viewer I was horrified. What could have possibly turned love to hate? Was the whole friendship inauthentic? Why be friends with someone you think is a dullard (and to be fair, Padráic really doesn't have a lot upstairs)? Perhaps Colm simply outgrew him. But there's got to be better ways, less hurtful ways, to communicate that.

For Padráic's part, well, he can't take no for an answer. And so Colm follows through on his threat and chops off a digit, whipping it at Padráic's cottage door. THUNK. Padráic, you've just been given the finger. 

Whodathunk?

You'd think the young man would see the light and leave Colm the fuck alone. Nope: that just angers him further. Things keep escalating, in a village parody of the Irish Civil War thundering away -- well within earshot -- on the mainland. (At one point Padráic hears the thundering guns and mutters to himself "good luck to you. Whatever you're fighting about." 

Almost from the opening reel, I was forced to confront every friend who ever decided, for whatever reason, that my presence no longer served them. It's not like that happens every other week, but as a man who never really learned how to make friends and who, to be perfectly honest, struggles to keep them, this movie hit a hell of a lot of insecurity points of mine. Hammered on them.

I talk a good game about divergence. I do understand that sometimes friends outgrow each other, and further that I am the sort of person who is easy to outgrow. My own growth is glacial and largely internal in this life. I haven't been to the mountain. And I have little doubt I'm annoying to people. It's not like I try to be. I try not to be. But I have no doubt people -- perhaps many people -- see me as Padráic.

I have played both parts in my life. I have been Colm, and cut a friendship of twenty years off at the knees because it had been dawning on me over a period of time that my friend was in fact an emotional vampire. Her life was an endless series of crises, most of them of her own making, and no amount of emotional support was sufficient. I told her as much, too, but being as I had set myself up since high school as a problem dumpster extraordinaire, I have little doubt Jen thought me nothing but a giant fake.

I've hurt other people in a couple of knee-jerk snaps, neither of which I will ever forgive myself for -- as cheap as that sounds to the friends I hurt. But more often I have been Padráic, wounded myself, I wrote about the most painful instance here. There's been one very similar of much more recent vintage, a friend and colleague who did a slow fade and never explained why.

Yeah, I talk a good game. Relationships, whether they're friendships or marriages or something in between, are not prisons and I won't hold you in one with me. But I have asked why received an unsatisfactory answer, and asked why a few more times, each more strident and pathetic, and taken each non-response more and more personally. 

I mourned Kieron for years. I'll mourn Nicole for years. But -- and maybe this says something bad about me -- I'll mourn whatever drove them away forever. At least with Nicole I could feel the friendship slipping away, the warmth ebbing by slow degrees. I saw the end coming. 

My dad once told me he wished he'd dumped someone before he was to be dumped himself, and at the time I thought that a really immature impulse. I think it's fair to say I've come to understand what Dad was getting at. Further, to appreciate it a bit. It sucks to say, but sometimes this is a hurt or be hurt world. 

This movie taught me something valuable: how love can curdle into hatred. It's not something I have ever experienced myself -- even the people I hurt were hurt in a moment of unforgivable loss of control, I still love each and every one of them. But watching The Banshees of Inisherin, I began to understand that my aversion to conflict and commitment to emotional management are really all that separates me from a man like Padráic. That's a bit sobering. More sobering still is the possibility -- it's always in the back of my mind, but this film brought it forward, painfully -- that any or all of my friends might suddenly cut all contact with me tomorrow. 

That's not just sobering, that's petrifying.

You really can't ask more of a piece of art than for it to teach you something about yourself. For that reason, as difficult a watch as this was for me, I'm ferociously glad I got to see it.