Few people approaching Polly Findlay’s gentle drama with no prior knowledge would fail to identify it as a literary adaptation. Ciarán Hinds and Lesley Manville are perfectly cast as an emotionally stunted Irish couple living a tolerable life in a pleasant corner of Glasgow.
Neither fully reconciled to a personal tragedy during the Troubles, they have retreated into familiar (and believable) consolations. Gerry makes slightly pathetic attempts to conceal the amount of whiskey he is putting away. Stella is immersed in the church. All the most important traumas remain unexpressed and unprocessed.
Adapted from a 2017 novel by Bernard MacLaverty – a master of the suppressed emotion – and Nick Payne, Midwinter Break happens upon a cunning strategy for disrupting the melancholy equilibrium. In an idle moment Stella books a trip to Amsterdam as a surprise Christmas gift. A change in environment can often ignite a dormant relationship – not that that is necessarily her intent.
Laurie Rose’s flinty cinematography pays homage to the geometric beauty of the Dutch city, even as it communicates its cheek-busting cold at the turn of the year. There is a sense of the relationship sliding somewhere uncertain as Stella takes an interest in a Catholic convent at the heart of Protestant Amsterdam. Gerry, an architect whose practice faltered during the bombings, expresses bewilderment at her need for deeper spiritual meaning.
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The performances cannot be faulted. Hinds and Manville skilfully convey a relationship founded on the most fragile of intertwining insecurities. We get a sense that both understand the evasions they are making and accept them for fear of bringing the whole structure down upon their heads. Couples get by with far more destructive deceits. There is no violence. There is little anger. There is not even that much misery. There is just getting by.
For all the subtlety of the acting and the attractiveness of the backgrounds, it is not clear that Findlay and her team have made a film of Midwinter Break. Too often it feels as if we are watching a sketch for a more layered work to come. Gentle ambiguities – the sort that successfully close out novels – get a tad lost as the action (if that’s the word) drifts towards indecision.
Few will, however, fail to be moved by the sadness of the central relationship. A humane work devised by serious minds.
In cinemas from Friday, March 20th
