Mark Blickley

I haven't seen the first Knives Out mystery so have no point of comparison, but based on this film I'm not interested in seeing it. The so called plot lacks dramatic action and the pacing of the film is reliant on exposition because these ensemble actors are not individualized characters who interact with each other--they're puppets voiced by a single ventriloquist. They reminded me of static chess pieces that don't move but are just spoken about in order to explain a game strategy point of view. So disappointing that some truly fine actors I admire were reduced to cardboard cutouts. I was expecting to embrace the silly, but not the boring.

'Banshees of Inisherin' was written and directed by the inspired/inspiring Martin McDonagh. It was shot on the amazing Achill Island, one of the most remarkable landscapes I've ever visited. It's quite sad but proof of how so often Irish writing and acting can be truly superior. The two leads are exquisite as they deftly see-saw between victim and victimizer. One takeaway I got from the film is how love for animals civilizes men.

This film is an extended Shirley Jackson short story with Shirley as the dual protagonists, herself and the young, pregnant academic's wife who gives birth to Shirley's novel within a novel. I thought it a compelling peek into the mind of a sacred misfit who withdraws from the conventional world into a greater world of imaginative, deviant dervishes. Moss and Young played off each other beautifully, not unlike reflections in a fun house mirror that becomes less and less distorted as time unfolds. It examines the powerful intimacy between the artist and her mirrored muse. It's a film about aesthetic process, not plot. In her real life Shirley Jackson was the mother of four children who wrote popular, humorous books about parenting as well as literary horror. Despite the Shirley character being childless, I liked how she responded to the young wife's baby in a protective manner, never once raising a suggestion she would ever do the baby harm. For all her frightening eccentricities and social behaviors, they left Shirley Jackson's true motherly instincts intact in the film. I think it important that a woman wrote the screenplay adaptation of another woman's novel, and that it was also directed by a woman.