On the island of Inisherin and against the backdrop of the 1922-23 Irish Civil War, lies this bizarre story.

From one day to the next for no real reason Colm rejects a lifelong friendship with Padraic, a simple, mild and carefree man.

The latter, who asks for explanations, who wonders what happened, who confronts his sister and even resorts to the young, awkward and troublesome jester Dominic, cannot bring himself to accept it.

For years in fact, the two friends have been meeting every afternoon at 2 o'clock to go drinking in the only pub on the island, an established daily habit that finds on one day x, unpredictably, a total rejection from Colm who begins to avoid his friend.

Padraic in disbelief and confusion cannot come to terms with this and confronts some of the small group of people who inhabit the island.

No one understands why Colm would screw up the friendship: Padraic has neither done nor said anything that could have compromised it, so they begin to speculate that Colm is ill, that he is depressed, until the older friend gives an explanation that turns out to be worse than expected: "he no longer intends to waste his time," he wants to devote himself to art, music, and his violin.

Padraic falls into despondency, he begins to doubt that the man ever really loved him, he feels abandoned and betrayed but does not give up, he continues to search for his friend/father and persists in wanting to talk to him.

Colm understands that if he does not make a drastic decision his younger friend will never understand: the threat is to cut off the fingers of his hand if Padraic does not leave him alone to create.

However, no one seems to believe Colm's threats; he a violin player can never inflict this punishment on himself.

Beyond this threat on the island lives Mrs. Mc Cormick, fascinated by death, the personification of the banshee, a female spirit that screams omens, and the son of the community policeman, a tragic and lucid character on the fringes of even this peripheral reality, as his father beats and abuses him as well as hating Padraic and his sister for whom he harbors great hostility as a free, educated and independent woman.

A story about the whole community, small, gossipy and unhealthy: a combination of discord and madness as well as amusing loquacity.

All the protagonists hide their loneliness, their secrets and their needs: each in their own way tries to survive their role.

Even that of friendship is a role that Colm no longer intends to play, and he has a complete right to it, just as, however, Padraic has the right to understand what no one can actually understand.

Filmed on the islands of Inishmore and Achill on the west coast of Ireland, in the face of the ongoing civil war, far from the island from which the shots are heard, it is a metaphor for something that can break at any moment with consequences that can prove negative and damaging with lasting outcomes.

A hilarious but also dark film full of humanity and the nonsense that humanity produces, which tells much more than it lets on.

Can a lifelong friendship be thrown into crisis because one finds the other boring?

Can such an emotional misrecognition be welcomed with serenity without a reaction?

There is an important subtlety in the film: the right to live in solitude and to change one's mind and on the other hand that of not naively accepting abandonment or perhaps betrayal.

While a broader conflict rages on the continent, here two former friends fight their own little personal war, between character archetypes of a self-referential community, living in a place where nature expresses itself sublimely and wildly while the human factor disguises its weaknesses.

It embodies the two ends the film: fun and sadness.

Loyalty, friendship, separation, loneliness, death, pain, violence.

The concept of limits cuts across: causing or accepting pain is what is at stake, and if one does not understand where one needs to stop and how to do it then the outcome will be disastrous.

23-Jun-2023 by Fab