Rather clumsily titled My Sailor, My Love in English, being entirely set in North Ireland with Irish and British actors, this is a family drama with James Cosmo as a retired sea captain, a grumpy widower living alone surrounded by food scraps in a dark, remote house. His daughter persists in trying to get him into a retirement home, and then settles for hiring a part-time housekeeper without telling him first. This has the unexpected consequence that he warms to the new presence in his home and they develop a loving relationship, something that his daughter rails against as it means that he both drifts even further from her and also out of her control of his life.
Now the father turns jovial and the daughter, now having issues with her husband too, is beyond despair, until the father's health becomes a concern and changes the balance again.
This is a very sensitively composed piece, with subtly realised depictions of relationships withing families and fine acting, but it does have one flaw, which is a structural one: it leaves it until the very last segment to properly explain what kind of a man the sea captain really was when his wife died and what the daughter had to go through to leave her so damaged, and feeding this background in more slowly from earlier on would have meant less of a jolt just for the sake of it, and more fully rounded character growth. Still, a small criticism of a film that's a rare anmal in a world where most films just seek to capitalise on cheap twists and histrionics.
7/10
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