Well, it’s just so damn good.

If you’ve been suffering for a long while, as I have, with the incredibly drab and derivative movies on offer, The Banshees of Inisherin is the one for you. This new film written and directed by Martin McDonagh reunites the lead actors Brendan Gleeson and Colin Farrell from McDonagh’s beloved 2008 film, In Bruges, and the results are darkly hilarious and tragic and shocking and engrossing and poignant and all the good things you keep hoping for.

This unique tale is about the tiny rural Irish community living on a remote (and fictional) island of Inisherin, which is mostly able to ignore the 1920s civil war raging on the mainland, except for the sounds of distant explosions. But a personal civil war opens up when two old friends suddenly become estranged. One day, Colm Doherty (Brendan Gleeson) says impassively to Pádraic Súilleabháin (Colin Farrell), “I just don’t like you anymore.” Pádraic’s desperate attempts to win his friend back and Colm’s brutal tactics in forcing an end to the friendship create increasingly devastating ripples of reaction through the community.