The Unquiet Man —The Banshees of Inisherin (Martin McDonagh, 2022) and the Aesthetics of Marginality

s last work, The Banshees of Inisherin, received numerous nominations at various award ceremonies, as well as widespread critical acclaim. 1 It was fairly successful at the box office 2 and reinforced McDonagh's fame as the enfant terrible of Irish letters and filmmaking, famous both as a director and as a playwright, noted for the violence of his plots and his bizarre and provocative subject matters (Pilny; Cornwell, 296-7).It deals indeed with a fairly gruesome and absurd story, about two men living on an island off the coast of Galway, who used to be best friends until one of them, Colm (played by Brendan Gleeson) decides to split off with the other (Pdraic, played by Colin Farrell), and threatens him with self-mutilation unless he stops any relation with him absolutely.This seems like a mere stylistic and dramatic wager, but McDonagh manages to inspire his narrative with life and meaning in part because he situates his plot in a specific time and space, which could be called marginal itself, and which makes for an important part of his aesthetics in this work.This frame is set in 1923, at the end of the Irish Civil War, in a place largely split off from the daily turmoil of the troubles on the mainland.The margins also have to do in the narrative with the mingling of tragical and comical tones, through which what seems to be at first a joke made in poor taste degenerates into a gory farce.At the moment when we may think The Banshees of Inisherin is pure comedy, it veers towards horror, when it seems to be a metaphysical, absurdist farce, it turns into tragedy, e.g. when Dominic (Barry Keoghan), the local Garda's abused son commits suicide.I wish to examine how precisely this interplay with margins -geographical, stylistic or atmosphericcontributes to the very meaning of the film.To do so, I will first focus on the formal devices connected to the topic of marginality, before examining how the narrative, drawing on a number of stereotypes attached to Irishness, uses tonal shifts to situate its discourse at the margin of conflicting representations.