The Dao of Inisherin (first draft)
The Dao of Inisherin Cloaked in elements of eccentric dialogue, gruesome self-mutilation, a captivating score and idyllic pastoral cinematography, The Banshees of Inisherin is widely regarded to be a black comedy characterized by heavily stereotyped Irishness within a loose metaphor to the Irish Civil War of the early 1920s. In the review “ Blarney ” for Slate , Mark O’Connell does well to lay bare the stereotyping in the film as well as its slack ties to the war, describing McDonagh’s Irish setting as “clearly the work of an ‘Irish writer,’ but it’s an Irishness formed as much by distance as intimacy […] reacting against a somewhat abstract idea of the place, informed by an emigrant’s reverence and romanticism”, while the backdrop of war “as a metaphor [is] both vague and clumsy [...] as a political allegory, it seems obviously retrofitted, tacked onto the narrative to add unearned resonance.” Agree or not with the perspective Slate ’s O’Connell offers, the elements described are cer...