Midwinter Break Review – A sad, prickly, and brilliantly acted portrait of rupture and ecstasy | film

MMovies about aging empty-nesters who go on a bittersweet vacation and unexpectedly have to confront something about their relationship are common enough. Roger Michell’s Le Weekend starred Jim Broadbent and Lindsay Duncan as an older couple spending their Eurostar break in Paris; And in Paolo Virzi’s succulent The Leisure Seeker, Donald Sutherland and Helen Mirren dash off in a Winnebago. There’s often something soft, mysterious and sinfully depressing about the indulgent sentimentality of sunset in these films – but that’s not the case with Polly Findlay’s deeply sad, prickly and wonderfully acted film, based on the novel by Bernard MacLaverty (author of Cal).

Gerry and Stella, played by Kieran Hinds and Lesley Manville, are a late-middle-aged couple from Northern Ireland who leave for Scotland in the 1970s, traumatized by the Troubles, and take a restorative mid-winter holiday in Amsterdam. They seem quite happy and affectionate, but Jerry has a drinking problem and Stella feels lonely because Jerry does not share her Catholic faith. In Amsterdam, Stella is thrilled by the quiet beauty of the Begijnhof, the city’s 14th-century enclosed courtyard that historically housed unmarried Catholic women who wanted to devote themselves to God.

Stella realizes she wants nothing more than to live there too. She could suddenly see with unforgiving clarity how she had always hated Jerry’s gentle mockery of her religion; Maybe she always hated him too. She confesses to Cathy (Niamh Cusack), an Irish expatriate in the city, a terrible secret about her time in Northern Ireland that she has never told anyone.

There is perhaps something a little too obvious about making The Troubles a key moment in the past for Northern Irish figures, though that is plausible enough for a certain generation. The film creates a space for Hinds and Manville to give substantive, intimate, and complex performances of the kind that most films (of whatever genre) don’t allow for their protagonists, and Manville in particular is deeply moving.