Helen Walsh’s tender love story about love and longing amidst a fishing community on Anglesey is a slow-burn character piece that makes the most of the bleakly beautiful coastal landscapes. Barry Ward plays Jack: a taciturn man in midlife, part of a family business with his brother Dyfan, portrayed by Madfabulous director Celyn Jones. They are mussel farmers: out in all weathers, knee deep in freezing salt water, scraping by.
Jack is married to Maggie (Liz White); the couple’s teenage son Tom (Henry Lawfull) is acting out, mixing with the wrong kids and reluctant to be a part of the family business. When deckhand Daniel (a tattooed Lorne MacFadyen) appears on the scene, helping out on the trawlers, there is an instant attraction between him and Jack. Can a relationship bloom within this close-knit community, where masculinity follows certain patterns and Jack has a family and a business to lose?
Told with economy, amidst grey rugged skies, On The Sea has a real air of authenticity. The day-to-day struggles and hardships of fishing, and the men sucked into its world, are well-drawn, if at times there are slips in the north Walian accent from an otherwise excellent, emotionally repressed Ward and his estranged wife, a sympathetic White. Other actors from the region round out the cast – notably the excellent Leisa Gwenllian, so good in Effi O Blaenau, as Tom’s girlfriend as well as stalwarts Julian Lewis Jones, Lisa Jen Brown and Robert Gwyn Davin.
It’s a film that feels lived in, and which takes its time to build to an emotional climax as the stifling atmosphere closes in, causing inevitable friction as MacFadyen and Ward fall for each other. The consequences for the pair, in a local society where church still holds sway and what it means to be a man is written in stone, are portrayed sparely – but hold weight under writer/director Walsh’s empathetic gaze.
Dir: Helen Walsh (15, 111 mins)
In cinemas from Fri 24 July.
A preview screening takes place at Chapter Arts Centre, Cardiff on Tue 21 July, featuring a Q&A with Lorne MacFadyen and producer David Hughes (tickets: £5-£9. Info: here).
words KEIRON SELF
