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I liked the dumb guy. He was just a dumb normal guy trying to get by. And I don’t remember him becoming a bastard — maybe he was hardened by the donkey death but I don’t recall meanness.
Whatshisass with the fiddle and the bloody stumps for fingers, he was a bastard. A proper fucktaint of a man, driven by a desire to wreak havoc based on his own whims. He’s a sociopath at best. Like that’s literally the nicest word I can use to describe him.
I know the donkey death was an accident. I know real donkeys didn’t die. But oof, it just stung. Also I’d been taking about this movie for MONTH with my girlfriend and when we finally watched it she almost DID vomit, she was crying so hard. She was just like, “What! Why?” And I was like, “I. Don’t. Know. Fuck. This.”
I really love the director — Martin McDonagh — and all his other films are amazing, but this one just felt cruel. There were bleak moments in In Bruges, Seven Psychopaths and 3 Billboards, for sure, but for some reason this one hit me harder and left a more sour taste in my mouth.
Also, I’m not a PETA guy or anything but I really struggle with animal deaths in films. There was a similar scene in The Lobster, and I almost gave up. I paused the thing for like an hour, first to bawl, then to do a cost-benefit analysis of pushing on. I opted to see it through and I was glad I did because it was a very good film, and it had enough other stuff going on to distract me from that poor border collie lying dead in the hotel room.
The most memorable moments of Banshees, for me, are the donkey death, the bloody stumps hammering away at that goddamn fiddle, and the news that the poor sexually abused kid had committed suicide because whatshisname’s sister didn’t reciprocate his feelings, and he felt he had nothing to live for as his whole world was suffering.
Yuck.
Just not for me at this point in my life. Not for me.
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