Banshees of Inisherin: The Game
bansheesthegame.comBased on a recent "black comedy" movie: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt11813216/
Which is one of the weirdest and heaviest hitting films I've seen recently, and while there is some comedy, it is not a funny movie.
Its a truly incredible film, but has a few subtleties that may be hard to catch at first glance. Pay attention to the colors that people are wearing (green, orange, red, and blue) for the deeper subtext of relationships of the political situation in Ireland.
I may be missing a detail or two, and would happily be corrected, but for the curious:
- Green = Catholics / IRA supporters
- Yellow/Orange = Protestants
- Red = English
- Blues = Anglo-Irish Treaty supporters (?)
edit: formatting
do you know this definitively? was it in the book?
I'm asking because I picked up a hitchhiker way back when that was an ordinary thing to do, and he was a vocational school grad, but told me this whole thing about how the Wizard of Oz was a parable about the gold standard (follow the yellow bricks to the Emerald City) vs greenback dollar, with the cowardly lion (Dept of Defence) and the Tin Man (midwest industrial might) and Scarecrow (agriculture), pitting the witches of the North and South and East and West... you get the picture. It's a very tight theory, and I was shocked I hadn't learned this in my college track/college career.
and I believed it for the next decades till I found out: it wasn't true.
So I ask you again, is this something you know you know? I only have time left to believe one new thing and I need to be sure of it
> do you know this definitively? was it in the book?
I can't really speak to this, which is why I have a (?) around the meaning of Blue. I can say that green, orange, and red have pretty obvious connections, especially given the context of the film taking place during the Irish Civil War, which directly followed the Irish War of Independence (from England, who wore red in battle).
If it helps assuage your fear, you can take a look at the meaning of the colors of the Irish flag to see context for green and orange.
For the curious:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_interpretations_of_T...
NB, the background to the film is this fratricidal conflict circa 1922: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irish_Civil_War
Not the sectarian "troubles" and IRA, circa the 1970s. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Troubles
Interesting, I'm going to have to rewatch and see if that's the case.
Absolutely loved the film. The acting and directing is superb. Colin Farrell's and Kerry Condon's performances are incredible, but Barry Keoghan steals the show.
This is one of my favorite scenes in recent memory: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBIsqYO9l8w
For me, it was the proposal scene: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N6oF9OpmjGw
What acting.
That scene is heartbreaking to watch. Keoghan deserved the academy award for best supporting actor this year IMO (as for best screenplay, while I think Banshee's should've gotten it, it was pretty close and EEAAO would've been my second choice anyway),
Is it supposed to be a caricature of a mentally disabled person? What is great about that acting? Not being rhetorical here, I'm not a person of high culture.
Basically this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X6WHBO_Qc-Q
Oh, yeah, genius. And heartbreaking :'(
Loved it too, It's funny in the absurdity of it all and the dialogue. There's a delicate balance of dark humour, the Irish charm of the setting and characters, and subtle deeper aspects that emerge from initially simple seeming characters that tops it all off. Not to mention the excellent acting.
But I suspect a lot of that is a subjective taste, so it's not surprising it's not widely appreciated.
> the Irish charm of the setting and characters
I find Irish people perfectly charming, but when it comes to the themes of Irish film and literature, charming does not oft spring to my lips. Did you watch this film to the end? warmed the cockles of your heart did it?
I was really down after I left the movie. It was unexpectedly one of the most depressing movies I've seen, right down there with The Reflecting Skin, Irreversible and Black Rain. It is a good movie, and I'm pleased that there's room in the public attention for movies like this, but the way that people talk about it I wonder if we even saw the same movie. I'm in no hurry to watch it again.
As I said not for everyone, I watched it to the end, not sure why you are implying otherwise.
>not sure why you are implying otherwise
i didn't imply anything, I literally asked, and more importantly, in a rhetorical sense as a lead-in to what I said after.
my comments in my opinion, like the film in your opinion, are not for everyone, only for people of superior taste.
> only for people of superior taste.
I'm not taking your bate soz.
Barry Keoghan continues to steal the show. He's in the recent The Green Night for a few minutes only but still pulls it off.
If I'm being honest, I have no idea what's going on in this scene.
as a quick vignette of life at one of the stops of the short bus, sure; but as it relates to the rest of the movie and why is it in there, I agree with you.
And if you liked this movie you might like "In Bruges". Very similar in mood and the same two lead actors (and director). Personally I liked In Bruges a bit more but they're both good
Couldn't disagree more. In Bruges is a wonderful black comedy. Banshees is not even remotely similar in story or mood; the two actors play entirely different characters.
Well, I couldn't disagree more with this. :)
Both are wonderful Black comedies, imo. I agree that the story and characters are different (but that's to be expected given they are different movies after all) but the mood is similar between the two. I'll concede that Banshees is darker than Bruges, though.
Agreed. Seems to really depend on the person. It came highly recommended to me by a family member, describing it as good and funny.
I found it absolutely not funny, very strange, and didn't like any of it one bit. Shame, because I really like most of what both leads do.
Completely agree. I kept asking myself "why does this movie exist and why am I watching it?"
I'd rather cut off a finger than watch it again. And making that joke was the only time I've laughed about that awful movie.
It's set during the Irish Civil War. Someone else in this thread posted a Wikipedia link to an article about this war. If you read some of that you'll begin to understand what the film is about.
> "why does this movie exist?"
"What is art?" I started to enjoy film more when I understood that the best directors are just telling a story and not don't care if you like it or not. Of course you are free to hate it.
The same applies to any form of art.
If you want a movies easy to enjoy, there's the superhero blockbuster movies and Star Wars, I guess.
I mean, you're not wrong, but the truth is, anyone can tell a story. I hear tons from drunks at bars and homeless folks in my city.
What makes a director/story writer so exalted as to have better stories?
The best movies, IMO, are those that can tell a story while drawing the audience in. Whether through comedy, sadness, shock, etc.
This movie was just a person telling a very weird story. Taken at pure face value, and ignoring the actors' talent, it sounds more like a story a random drunk person on a bus would tell.
I understand art is completely subjective, so I'm in no place to say you're wrong. But it's kinda dismissive to tell someone who hated it to watch superhero movies. Now -those- really shouldn't be made.
Never come to HN for engineers trying to describe film
It had a pretty good premise. But I felt like they couldn’t figure out the rest. The 3rd act felt meh to say the least.
The story was perfect for a short film and not a feature film. I bet if you edit the movie down to 20-25 minutes it will make a fantastic piece of art.
It just made me feel rotten. There was no laughter in our cinema.
> it is not a funny movie
Agree to disagree. I found it funny. Just try describing it to someone, and the premise is actually hilarious. But yes, dark, and heartbreaking in certain scenes. Great film.
I didn't like it that much. It was ok but I think it's been hyped out of all proportion.
Gleeson and Farrell are good actors, but for me the script let them down. It felt like it was trying too hard to be meaningful or symbolic but nothing landed.
Barry Keoghan was the best thing about it, amazing performance.
It was hilarious. My theater laughed out loud multiple times. Did you watch it on streaming?
It was brilliantly written and had a lot of laugh out loud moments, but it wasn't a comedy. It was extremely dark, just like the awful civil war that it was a metaphor for.
The melancholy, loneliness, and utterly pointless violence far outweighed the occasional laugh.
Reminds me of "The Lobster". A number of reviewers called it funny and a black comedy. I seriously wondered whether we watched the same movie.
So it was sometimes very funny, but was also sometimes very dark. Let's call it a… black comedy.
More like it was almost relentlessly melancholy, peppered with some horrific violence, agonizing conflict, and the occasional brilliantly written, darkly funny moments. Humor was honestly a tiny fraction of the total time.
You can call it whatever you want, but I'm certainly not going to recommend it to friends as a black comedy. That's a surefire way to set them up for disappointment.
I enjoyed this movie and can’t place what about it stuck with me.
I’ll be hit randomly in my day with recollections from the film and chuckle or even burst out laughing. More so than In Bruges or 3Billboards.
“That’s the same way my mammy died.” And “I’m here for the opposite of that. What’s the opposite of licks? I don’t know.” And “It takes two to tango. I don’t want to dance. You were dancing with your dog.”
Honestly that is a good way to describe a lot of the works by McDonagh.
One of the best directors out there. Just wish he had more to watch.
You can give his plays a whirl if you weren't aware of their existence.
Yeah after writing my comment I learned he was the mastermind behind In Bruges, which I loved, and Seven Psychopaths, which I forgot about but I remember enjoying its quirkiness.
I loved it, thought it was hilarious. Though to be fair I'm from Ireland, and I can see that the comedy might not translate well much further a field than Ireland or the UK.
It was a hilarious movie. It just also happened to be quite sad
Haven't seen it, but I absolutely love colin farrell in everything. In Bruges, 7 Psychopaths, The Other Guys (?)
He has that hangdog, depressed and confused thing going on that's so charming.
Is there a mood one should be in to watch it? (Or a mood it leaves you in.)
It will leave you sad and a bit forlorn, likely.
had to stop watching half-way, didn’t land anything for me.
Surprised it got that much hype
It was funny.
I found it incredibly hard to turn when I wanted to. Not sure if it is key detection or if I needed to have more precise timing.
Have to second this - a fantastic idea unfortunately marred by very poor control responsiveness.
Sibling comments are correct, on review, that it seems you can work around it by holding down in advance.
Unfortunately by the time I verified that I had run out of time since I spent most of what I had trying to make it work on my own before returning to the thread to offer this feedback.
Personally, I think the idea is good enough that I will try to return on desktop later when I have time… but for the devs - if you read this - you could really enable a lot more people to get a lot further in this presumably great creative experience if you made the controls respond better on mobile.
It looks like you have to hold the direction for a bit prior to turning. Pretty bad UX in my opinion. Especially since this makes it nigh unplayable on mobile as you fat thumb the tiny D-pad trying to hold the right direction down.
I tried it on keyboard and it's a bit more playable, but frustrating for players like myself who more than have the dexterity to press exactly when I want to.
A+ for humour, artistic style, and concept... D for play-ability.
It doesn't move like pacman, where it saves your keystroke momentarily. Instead you need to hold the key down until you reach a point where you can turn.
Keep the key pressed a few seconds before the turn.
Sounds like a player skill issue k2enemy
hold down the key rather than mashing
Not sure why you'd turn this into a game (it's awesome though!), but for anyone who hasn't seen the movie - I'd recommend it. It really has stuck with me long after I saw it. Starts out with "Father Ted" vibes, but end up going... in other directions.
If punching a policeman is a sin, we may as well just pack up and go home.
"Banshees" was an interesting but puzzling film. I enjoyed it but I didn't think it was quite as approachable as McDonaghs other films.
I suppose it's supposed to be an allegory to the futility of the Irish Civil War? If we the audience can't make a connection to something like that it feels a bit too abstract.
I didn't make it far into the game, but it is a neat project.
The Civil War connection is obvious (it's explicitly referenced at several points in the movie) but my interpretation was that the Civil War was a mirror for the characters' interactions, not the other way around. To me the movie was more a commentary on various aspects of Irish society which can exacerbate problems and inhibit progress and healing - lack of communication, holding of grudges, a tendency towards self-punishment. Even though the main characters were pretty much all mad they were also oddly familiar.
I liked it more than Three Billboards, but not as much as the excellent In Bruges.
Yeh, I made a similar comment. It didn't really connect with me. Like, Parasite went hard on the Korean life allusions, and it felt very clear even to foreign audiences what it was trying to say.
Banshees felt distant. Was it about Irish society specifically? I don't know much about Ireland but I got the feeling that this was a really fringe island community and probably not representative of Ireland realistically or figuratively. I don't really feel like the themes it was presenting were universal. Perhaps the timeliness was an issue. idk.
In Bruges is like peak black comedy. the themes itself, on some level, are pretty damn funny, which isn't a thing you really see in many works.
The nice thing about unclarified metaphors is that you can often find meaning in things from your own perspective, experience, and life. And most importantly - you're not just seeing shapes in the clouds. Many metaphors are not really about what happened in some situation, even when they literally are, but about humanity. And we tend to repeat the exact same behaviors over and over again, with little but technology providing a change of scenery.
As an example of this, much (and probably most) of good modern Russian cinema is a completely unexpressed metaphor between "old Russia" and "new Russia." What that actually means, oddly enough, isn't especially relevant. In America one could easily see it as a metaphor between religion and secularism, urban and rural, woke or not, liberal and conservative, and so on endlessly. You can even see it as an internal metaphor of our younger selves vs our older selves.
And the great thing is - is that it, in many ways, fits all of these contrasts perfectly. Because the details of the exact change that's "really" being contrasted, aren't nearly as relevant as how we, as humans, handle change and conflict. Or in this specific metaphor, how both sides of some issue may one another as wrong/inferior/flawed/etc from their own perspective. And how both are simultaneously right and wrong.
A movie that's absolutely excellent on this front is, "How I Ended This Summer." Even the title of the movie itself is a metaphor. The first time I watched that movie I did not especially like (nor dislike) it, but when you stop watching it literally, and as a broad unclarified metaphor it morphs into an excellent piece of art - even with 0 personal context of what the metaphor is "really" about.
I should clarify that I did like Banshees a lot (just not as much as In Bruges). I am Irish and I am (positively) surprised it has received the international acclaim that it has, for the exact reason that a lot of it felt quite Irish-specific to me and I didn't think it would travel well.
I would say the island community was more like a caricature of rural Irish society than an accurate representation. I feel like there was a universality to the themes explored but I agree that they are viewed through a very local lens.
It’s an allegory for something, but I can’t quite put my finger on it…
I'd have to hand it to you, that's a good one.
I thought this was simply one person trying to keep another one at arm’s length.
I’ve seen a lot of people connecting it to the Irish Civil War, but I think there’s a lot in there about the inherent selfishness/social-push-pull of creation (of art, specifically).
I don't think there's any allegory at all. The Civil War is a bleak backdrop, a reminder of brotherhood turned to hatred and the impending threat of death and so forth, but it's not much more than that. It's connected to the story by aesthetics and by mood rather than by plot or by meaning.
I found this video extremely helpful in explaining the civil war metaphor:
I thought it was about unrequited love.
> I do worry sometimes I might just be entertaining myself while staving off the inevitable.
Pretty certain that Colm Doherty was not referring to this game when he said this, but somehow it seems applicable.
Brilliant job!
The key detection is not great. Fun idea though
You also lose when the other person is quite far away. Not as intuitive as I'd like.
I appreciate that is a full game with nice graphics. I found the controls a bit unresponsive. Had to press multiple times in order to turn a corner.
Where is the subtext of the Irish Civil War?! Worst Movie-to-Game adaptation since Spy Hunter: Nowhere to Run (2006).
Everybody here talks about a movie (which is briliant from my perspective), or controls (which could be better), but no one asks WHY is this game made?
It doesn't make much sense it was created as a marketing device for a movie, it's not that kind of movie. However, considering names and graphics it looks totally as authorized work. My guess is it's a marketing device for an agency, which worked with a movie crew in some capacity and was granted a permission to use these assets for a bit of self-promotion.
Cogs and Marvel made a blog post about it: https://www.cogsandmarvel.com/news/cogs-marvel-release-bansh...
I rarely watch a movie that is so unpleasant that I wish I'd never seen it, but this one falls into that category. It is a dark exploration of isolated people suffering from profound mental illness. It is not even remotely similar to "In Bruges."
But it is beautifully photographed.
Imagine describing a metaphor for the American civil war as being about mental illness.
No connection at all with the common antecedent: British imperialism; slavery in America's case and a colonial legacy of partition imposed at gun point in Ireland's.
Love the art style, but I think you might need some sort of intro for the controls. Neither WASD nor arrow keys seem to have any effect, and the player seems to make random turns regardless of what key I have pressed, or whether I have any key pressed at all.
Sounds like your keyboard? Or you have some browser extension like Vimium
The issue was apparently that I didn't realize the player started in the top-left of the screen. I thought I was meant to control the character that starts in the center of the screen and starts moving immediately (like pac-man).
Controls are still a bit clunky (slow to respond), but do work.
To me the film just made the Irish look like dumb and uncivilized drunkards.
Yes, and? I think that was part of the point. I don’t think that’s the totality of describing Irish, but as someone that has a bit of Irish heritage and interactions with Irish it’s a common characteristic.
It’s a remote island right, and I think the history makes the more recent transformation more impressive and interesting.
Reinforcing negative stereotypes is not beneficial to the Irish minority in England.
I think celebrating independence from eight centuries of British rule by having a civil war did that for us.
Sounds like a bit of projection so
Great game. Playing it for five minutes saved me from watching the movie.
There's no up button on iOS. Not sure how to play without it.
I'd like to see the end but I cannot get past level 6. I'd enjoy a spoiler if anyone has it.
I enjoyed the film. There was this nagging feeling the whole time that there was supposed to be some sort of metaphor for the conflict in Ireland but I knew nothing about it, so it felt like I was missing something. I don't know that I really understood what it was trying to say either way. I liked 'In Bruges' a lot more personally.
> but I knew nothing about it
You're probably better off not knowing - any attempts at serious commentary on that conflict by the film didn't land well with anyone more informed. It's an enjoyable, likeable film, but cultural or political insights aren't McDonagh's strong points.
I also really liked Three Billboards, though I heard it received similar criticisms for its clumsy portrayal of US political themes (which I'm more distant from).
As a USian, I thought that Three Billboards was nuanced and not clumsy at all. Having grown up with racism everywhere, I find it interesting that there’s not much art that shows the complexity of racism where it isn’t nazi-esque monsterism of pure evil, but also banal and pervasive. The portrayal of the super racist sheriff who does some good reminds me of a horrible family member who comes through when there’s a death. Or a broken clock being right twice a day.
I didn’t read any criticisms of the film that seemed serious to me. I didn’t seek out too many reviews but probably read a dozen that boiled down to “portrayed racists in positive light” and that just seemed to not understand the film much at all. But there may be more detailed and nuanced criticism that I haven’t seen.
> "portrayed racists in positive light"
The specific critique I recall being levelled at it in this context was more "racist has apparent redemption arc by helping white people, despite never addressing/showing remorse for past acts of racism", which doesn't seem as simplistic.
Personally I didn't come away feeling the character was redeemed anyway, so if that was intended as a redemption arc I missed it. But mostly I just didn't treat it as serious political commentary & just enjoyed the witty writing & delivery.
Whatever the reason this should be a thing. They should do Triangle of Sadness next.
All in all, a pretty good digital adaptation. The movie was shear joy to watch.
Brilliant - no notes.
Makes me wish for more unconventional film-game adaptations.
Reminds me of another unexpected video game adaptation https://greatgatsbygame.com/
This game is unplayable on iphone
It's pacman with old men
lmao what is wrong with you
Thank you.
Great concept. Has anyone else finished the film? I'm a bit past the thump on the door and not sure if I want to finish the movie if things keep going that way.
It's a wonderful meditation on friendship. A couple shots showing the aftermath of his threat carried out, but they're brief.
Highly recommend.
Things keep going that way. First movie I saw from that director, so I didn't expect he'd actually lead the film down that path so quickly and determinedly.
But if you don't like the start of that path, you probably won't like the middle or end.
Try "In Bruges". Same director and 2 lead actors. A very different setting and premise. No less dark.
I stopped watching halfway but forced myself to finish watching it the next day and wasted another hour of my life