Why The Banshees of Inisherin Feels Emotionally True Despite Its Absurdity

There is something uniquely unpleasant about watching a friendship end, when nobody can fully explain why it deserves saving anymore.

That discomfort sits at the centre of The Banshees of Inisherin. The film begins with a simple rupture: Colm abruptly decides he no longer wants to speak to Padraic, despite years of companionship and routine. Padraic, understandably, reacts like a man whose reality has suddenly shifted half an inch sideways overnight. One day there is friendship. The next day there is a locked emotional door and no clear explanation attached to it.

I watched the film thinking much of it felt unreal. The behaviour is exaggerated almost immediately. The emotional escalation becomes theatrical. The finger-cutting ultimatum drifts into a level of symbolic commitment most adults thankfully reserve for politics and family inheritance disputes.

Yet the film lingered anyway.

Not because I believed the literal events. I didn’t, really. What stayed with me was the emotional structure underneath all the absurdity. The feeling that one person had already emotionally left the friendship long before the other noticed. That part felt horribly familiar.

The Cruelty of Ending Something Without a “Good Enough” Reason

Colm is cruel. I don’t think the film avoids that.

Not because he wants the friendship to end, but because he announces it so abruptly that Padraic never even understands what changed. There is no gradual distancing or softened transition. Colm simply decides the friendship no longer deserves continuation, and expects Padraic to quietly accept the update.

But in real life, we prefer slower exits or delayed replies. With less initiation and increasing busyness, emotional fading can be disguised as scheduling problems. By your mid-30s, entire friendships can disappear through calendar drift and mild exhaustion alone. Nobody announces anything formally, because adulthood tends to treat friendship endings as administratively awkward rather than emotionally significant.

That is partly why the film unsettles people. It externalises behaviour we usually hide inside politeness.

At the same time, the film refuses to make Padraic entirely innocent either. He keeps pushing against Colm’s boundary long after it becomes obvious that the friendship itself has changed shape. He does not really hear Colm. He keeps trying to restore the old rhythm through repetition, as though familiarity itself should be persuasive.

That dynamic felt painfully recognisable too. Many friendships deteriorate because both people become trapped inside different emotional timelines. One person is already grieving the relationship, while the other still thinks restoration is possible if everybody returns to their usual seats.

Some Friendships Survive Mostly Through Inertia

Something I kept thinking about afterwards was how many adult friendships continue simply because nobody actively ends them, as explored by Arden.

Routine is incredibly powerful socially. Shared workplaces and old school history. Group chats nobody enjoys anymore but nobody leaves either. Familiarity can imitate intimacy surprisingly well for quite a long time.

Sometimes the emotional reality changes years before the social structure does.

I once had a friend invite me into a personal project. I was handling the web design side of things until another acquaintance joined and quickly criticised my work, despite not being especially experienced in design himself. My friend immediately shifted me away from creative work and asked me to only handle meeting minutes instead, which is a wonderfully efficient way of making someone feel professionally decorative without technically insulting them.

I quietly left the project afterwards. Politely. No confrontation. No dramatic speech.

The friendship itself continued for years.

At the time, I convinced myself the incident was small enough to overlook. It seemed easier to preserve the friendship than interrogate what the situation actually revealed about how I was valued within it. That sort of emotional compromise is fairly common in adulthood. People tolerate subtle disrespect all the time if the alternative risks social disruption.

The strange thing is that the friendship only truly ended later, after I met healthier people.

Better friendships have an unfortunate habit of retroactively exposing older ones. You suddenly notice who listened to you properly. Who respected your work. Who treated your feelings as inconvenient background noise whenever their priorities entered the room, much like the final straw that forced Tae to end his own compromised friendship.

Sometimes the hardest part of adulthood is realising certain relationships survived less because they were healthy, and more because they helped soften loneliness in familiar ways.

The emotional recalibration happens quietly. Then one day you realise you no longer feel particularly motivated to preserve certain relationships at all. No explosion required.

Why the Film’s Unreality Still Works

Part of me resisted The Banshees of Inisherin because the characters often behave less like ordinary people, and more like emotional positions arguing with each other.

Even the island feels psychologically sealed off from normal human moderation. People in real life rarely announce friendship endings so bluntly. They certainly do not mutilate themselves to reinforce interpersonal boundaries, which would make office disputes considerably more difficult to schedule around.

Still, I suspect the film understands that exaggeration is necessary to expose something quieter underneath.

Modern adults are generally uncomfortable admitting that some friendships simply expire emotionally. We prefer moral clarity, or even betrayal and cruelty. A decisive event everybody can point at afterwards.

Without that, friendship endings feel socially illegitimate.

If somebody says: “This person hurt me badly,” people understand the breakup immediately. But when it comes to “I just don’t want this friendship in my life anymore,” the reaction becomes murkier. Choosing to walk away sounds selfish, cold, and ungrateful.

The film pushes this discomfort into absurd territory because the emotional truth underneath is difficult to look at directly. There is also a faint political shadow hanging over the story in the background, which probably explains why the conflict sometimes feels irrationally destructive. The Irish Civil War echoes quietly across the island: people severing bonds permanently while outsiders struggle to understand how things deteriorated so completely. Personal stubbornness starts resembling collective tragedy after a while.

Which is perhaps a slightly grand comparison for two men arguing near a donkey, but the emotional pattern is there.

Adult Friendship Endings Rarely Arrive Cleanly

What stayed with me most was not the conflict itself, but the sadness underneath it.

Padraic wants emotional continuity. Colm wants emotional escape. Neither of them really knows how to navigate that difference without causing damage.

That feels more realistic than the literal plot.

A lot of adult friendship endings are not dramatic enough to justify mourning publicly, yet painful enough to leave a strange residue behind. You stop hearing from somebody. The dynamic changes. Messages become functional rather than warm. Shared history remains intact, while emotional closeness quietly drains away underneath it.

Then eventually you realise the friendship only survives as memory maintenance.

People often describe romantic heartbreak with enormous emotional vocabulary. Friendship grief tends to arrive far less ceremonially. There are no accepted scripts for it. Mostly just silence and mutual avoidance conducted with varying degrees of politeness.

Perhaps that is why The Banshees of Inisherin lingers despite its unreality. Beneath all the theatrical behaviour sits a recognisable fear: that some relationships cannot be repaired, once emotional withdrawal has already happened internally.

Not because nobody cares. Sometimes they just don’t know how to care in the same way anymore.

And adulthood, for all its supposed maturity, does not always give people the language to admit that gently.