“It’s also a deeply melancholy picture about the way dissatisfaction, the anxiety of recognizing the emptiness of a supposedly comfortable life, can creep up on you, with Pádraic and his carefree ways the casualty of another man staving off those feelings.”

How's the despair?

I’m not putting me donkey outside when I’m sad, okay?

- Do you think God gives a damn about miniature donkeys? - I fear he doesn’t. And I fear that’s where it’s all gone wrong.

I mean, I’m a happy lad. Or I was. Til me best friend started acting the gilly-gooly.

It’s not about Inisherin. It’s about one boring man leaving another man alone, that’s all.

"It’s tough stuff that unfolds pretty much in one room. Which doesn’t give Aronofsky much space for his usual visual panache. So, nearly all of that overeager energy is channeled through The Whale’s depiction of Charlie’s body, a prosthetic creation that Fraser wears like a cross on his shoulder. This is a mighty act of becoming, the film seems to insist—and also one of empathy. But what’s expressed instead is a kind of leering horror, a portrait of a man gone to catastrophic ruin so that we, in the audience, may tap into our nobler, higher minds and see the worthy human being beneath the frightful exterior. 

That doesn’t feel anything like empathy. I trust that that intention was there, on both Aronofsky and Fraser’s parts, but their execution is turgid and ghastly. Nearly every time Charlie goes to take a bite of food, Aronofsky’s cues up Rob Simonsen’s unrelentingly bombastic score, plaintive and sinister strings indicating that something very, very bad—and scary—is happening. What might have been a somber and carefully considered study of a lonely man grappling with his past becomes a posturing labor.

....