“The Banshees of Inisherin” & “Decision to Leave”: Two Studies On the Severing of a Connection & The Unraveling of the Aftermath
Two parallel parables, two lonely characters at its core: one set in modern South Korea, the other in rural 1920s Ireland. Both nations even share a unique commonality: twin bloody histories of civil division borne from differing ideologies, the impacts of which both nations are still learning to navigate to this day.
At the heart of “Banshees of Inisherin” is an unraveling: an act of forward motion for one and the standstill for another. times certainly change, but not everyone’s always willing to go along with it.
There’s always a victim in any collision. How strange the million little mysteries in the microcosmic connections between two people. How curious the things we do, the behaviors we take on. More often than not, the aftermaths of the tragedies we place on ourselves outlast the reasons we put them there in the first place.
In “Decison to Leave”, characters communicate and then coalesce, always falling short of making the connection they really want to, whether for lack of language or circumstance. There’s a certain way Park Chan-wook manages to capture and hold your attention like few other directors can, watching his films sometimes feels like watching a rebirth of a kind of cinema.
The magnitude of human emotion transcends even the best of our efforts. Of all the mysteries in the world, the intrigue of another person — the willingness to let yourself into the pull of each other’s orbits — remains the greatest unsolved case of all.
More often than not we are left at a loss with all of our overgrown melancholia, the weight of all our hanging solitude. The only plausible truth of the human condition is our complete stupidity for one another, and yet it is the only thing that keeps us going on living.
