The Ballad Of Wallis Island (2025)

I had fully intended to see The Ballad of Wallis Island in a theater. The release date was circled; I told myself it’d go…Then ordinary life happened, and time slipped by. When I finally watched it at home, I expected little more than polite appreciation. What I found instead was something even better than I had anticipated.

Directed by James Griffiths and expanded from a short he made years earlier, the film follows Charles (Tim Key), an eccentric lottery winner who hires a long-disbanded folk duo, Herb McGwyer (Tom Basden) and Nell Mortimer (Carey Mulligan), to perform a private concert on his isolated Welsh island. The setup sounds like the premise for a crazy farce, and at times it is. But, the movie is more interested in what lingers after the jokes fade: the awkwardness of reunion, the weight of old silences, the small, stubborn ways people keep themselves apart even when they’re standing in the same room.

The island setting helps: windswept, spare, and lovely in an unshowy way, it mirrors the characters’ emotional geography, which is remote, a little worn, resistant to quick fixes. Griffiths never pushes for big revelations. He lets scenes breathe, trusts the actors to carry the subtext in a glance or a paused reply. Mulligan is especially impressive as Nell, conveying a woman who has made peace with her choices but still feels their cost in the set of her shoulders. Basden’s Herb is all guarded economy, and Key’s Charles (odd, voluble, occasionally exasperating) avoids tipping into caricature in a performance so well done it should be studied. His enthusiasm feels real, which makes the vulnerability underneath it land.

The humor is dry and British, rooted in small embarrassments and verbal ricochets rather than slapstick. The folk songs, written for the film, are simple and affecting; they do the emotional work without ever feeling forced. What the picture gets right, above all, is the idea that connection doesn’t require grand gestures. It can be as modest as staying through an uncomfortable conversation or letting someone see the mess you’ve carried for years.

I don’t think The Ballad of Wallis Island will convert everyone. It moves at its own deliberate pace, and its pleasures are understated. But in a season of louder films, its restraint feels almost contrarian and welcome. I still wish I’d caught it on a big screen, where the landscape and the music might have opened up more fully. Even so, finding it later, in the quiet of home after a long day, seemed oddly fitting.