The Ballad of Wallis Island

dir: James Griffiths

2025

The only reason I watched this flick, the only way in which I heard about it, is because it was recommended by Marina Hyde and Richard Osman on their podcast The Rest is Entertainment, one of the few podcasts I still listen to.

If you’re wondering why, and you’re probably not, but I have to imagine that you briefly rolled your eyes and then wondered, “why, fuckface?” in order for the bit to work, well, not only am I a very busy man with a lot on my plate, but I cut out / deleted any of the podcasts I used to listen to that have anything to do with politics.

Who can listen to that bullshit anymore? Every single one of them talking about the latest antics or spoutings of shite from the same appalling people invariably about the same shitty person. I can’t do it anymore. People, we’re all going to die. Some of us sooner than others, but, fuck, we can’t keep talking and thinking about the same appalling person all of the fucking time! That’s no way to spend however much time we have left.

Anyway, Marina and Richard, two people who I like and enjoy listening to, saw it and recommended it, and so like the sheep that I am I saw the flick too, knowing nothing else about it.

And I’m glad I did because I enjoyed the heck out of it. I am not entirely sure what kind of flick it is, in that you could just as easily call it a gentle drama as you could a light comedy, but both pigeonholes sell the flick a bit short.

Similarly, saying the flick is about loneliness, longing, re-connection or grief would additionally short sell what is really an airy and wry confection, despite most of the flick being set on a Welsh island.

Back in the early 2000s, there was a British folk band (in the world of this movie, not in ‘our’ world) called McGwyer Mortimer, a two-piece, and they achieved a modest amount of success, before seemingly breaking up acrimoniously. The two members were Herb McGwyer (Tom Basden) and Nell Mortimer (the great Carey Mulligan). I’m not sure they’re based on any particular band in British history, but there are no shortage of bands where performers got romantically involved and things fell apart.

A decade later, Mortimer doesn’t perform anywhere, and McGwyer has transitioned to pop bullshit writing commercial hits and having his songs presumably used in commercials. The well has run dry. Inspiration left a long time ago, possibly around the time (Nell) Mortimer left.

Money. Everyone needs money, that’s why it’s called money. Herb is lured to a gig on the aforementioned island, being deposited not on the shore but in the waist deep waters, in anticipation of one well-paid performance. He doesn’t know the person proposing the gig, and he doesn’t know that the person setting things up has lured Nell to the island as well.

The person in question, Charles (Tim Key) seems like the kind of superfan that results in a Misery type situation in a different kind of film, but here he’s not smashing anyone’s ankles or chaining anyone to any beds. Or trying to sew people together. But there’s enough of that madness rolling around in my brain from having watched way too many movies. He, being Charles, lives alone (now), and seems not to have spoken to humans for a long time, because he immediately talks a million miles a minute at Herb from the moment he greets him in the water to when Herb tries to change into dry clothes. And when other people try to get a baffled word in edgewise Charles’s Tourette’s like tendency to launch another sequence of words or rhyming slang seems almost involuntary.

He has of course all of their albums, but he’s also got all of their memorabilia, but also a bunch of mementoes of them, almost relics, perhaps creepy stuff. An old guitar here, a lock of someone’s hair there. And he was at many of their gigs, back in the day.

But the thing is, the moment where this fixation shifts from feeling potentially creepy to gentle and heartbreaking is when we realise he wasn’t even the real fan of the band – it was his wife Marie who adored them, and lived for them, until she died five years ago. The gig he’s commissioned is meant to be on the anniversary of her death.

If you’re wealthy enough to make things happen, well, obviously, you’d want the whole ‘set’ in order to feel that sense of achievement. Nell and her American husband Michael (Akemnji Ndifornyen) live in Portland, Oregon, and have nothing to do with the musical world anymore, but they still can appreciate a literal suitcase of cash. So Charles lures her out not telling her that Herb is coming, and Herb is lured out the same way, which makes them seem quite daft but whatever.

Their awkwardness gives way to a certain familiarity, but only up to a certain point. Whatever their connection in the past, it’s still really only in the past.

The seductiveness of music, however, is a trick that’s played only on the willing, and that includes us. When they play one of their old songs, one that Herb had initially been adamant that he’ll never play again, they easily, inexorably fall into those old grooves, and we take it a certain way, and Herb thinks, imagines it’s what he’s been missing all these ten years.

To tie the wellspring of one’s inspiration to one single other person is a dangerous and self-defeating thing. Whether he’s thought about it frequently in the past or is only indulging in it now, Herb is convinced that trying to make music without Nell doesn’t work, and that if he could somehow get the married “Nell” back, well, the world will be his oyster again.

There are films where we have two characters separated by circumstance or a tragic event, who come together again after much time has passed, and we wonder, like their characters seem to, whether they can recapture that magic ever again, or whether it’s too late, and they are kidding themselves. Not all audiences can stomach that kind of longing represented on screen. Past Lives is the obvious recent flick to reach towards, seeing as it has this very premise, and is less about the rom-com staple of “will they get together in the end well of course they will it’s a rom com”, and more of the “what could have been… what could have been, but beneath that bridge too much water has passed…”

But this is not that flick either. Charles longs for the wife he’s lost to death, and feels close to her through the music she loved, but he can never get her back. Herb longs to feel that connection through music with Nell again, but he’s longing for 2007, a moment in the past, which can’t come again no matter how many times they play together. When he makes a plaintive statement to Nell, she has no idea what he’s talking about, and has no intention or motivation to revisit the past or re-create it now.

And that’s why this is a sad film rather than a romantic or a comedic one. It’s still amusing, mostly from the baffling constant stream of dialogue from Charles, and his idiosyncrasies (which thankfully don’t rise to the level of affectations).

One of my absolute favourite bits of the flick, in a flick replete with quiet, joyful moments, is the sequence where Charlie is explaining how it is he’s in the position where he can tempt musicians to his island with suitcases of cash, despite not being a tech-bro or a Russian oligarch – he won a lottery.

He and his wife travelled the world, saw everything, did everything, and blew it all. And then, when it seems like he decided to win the lottery a second time, they decided to hold onto the money, hence the massive mansion on the isolated Welsh island.

Huh? Wuh? Buh?

What are the rest of us doing, not choosing to win the lottery, even once? Lazy bunch of layabouts we must be.

I love an explanation that raises more questions than it could possibly answer.

The songs are surprisingly good, and it’s perhaps unfair that I say that, but since Tom Basden, who plays Herb, wrote the songs, and is an actor, and not a folk singer from the early 2000s, I’m just saying, it’s quite a pleasant surprise. I hope it’s not unfair of me to say he sounds kinda like Damien Rice (remember when The Blower’s Daughter was played absolutely everywhere? No?), Jose Gonzalez, or maybe a quieter Glen Hansard, of the Frames and Swell Season fame.

But I feel bad even mentioning them, because he just sounds like a competent singer / songwriter singing his own songs. He’s totally believable in the part, because he’s created the character and developed him over the years (having first played the role in a short film that this flick seems to be an extension / expansion of).

He’s not an entirely likable chap, at first. He’s pretty… cold towards Charlie, barely polite initially, and that really doesn’t change for most of the flick. The question becomes, for us, whether we appreciate the reasons why he is like he is, appreciate where he is in life, and why the appeal of “another chance” is so compelling for him, but also why it’s fool’s gold. This really isn’t a flick where he and a former romantic partner / musical partner hash out some bad thing that happened in the past or try to resolve some outstanding question and reconcile – most of their initial conversations are guarded, wary; when they play together it’s comfortably sublime, and then when Herb pushes too far it all falls apart.

Nell is not really around for most of the film, but then it’s not really about her, is it?

The character playing her husband conveniently disappears for most of the film, which is one of the few contrivances in this mostly naturalistic-feeling flick that made me roll my eyes, but then when he comes back in time to tell Herb how pathetic he is, well, I figured he had one job to do, and he did it very well.

The story plays out in an unhurried manner, with the looming ‘gig’ in the background, with a lot of gentle filler to keep things rolling along amiably. Will it go ahead, will they both perform, will Herb slink off in shame or stick to his guns and deliver what he was paid to do? Oh, what will happen in the end, please tell me Oh Oracle of Cinema?

So you could see why a scene where Charlie and Herb play tennis might seem somewhat superfluous, but the way that ties into multiple aspects of the progressing story is quite clever. Charlie, having no-one to play with for at least the last five years, only really knows how to serve, which he does very well. But he’s also too rich to go after the balls once they’ve been served. That necessitates more trips to the local store, the only store on the island, where the only woman on the island (Sian Clifford) sells more tennis balls. Herb, in a moment of inspiration, suggests that if she wanted to play tennis, she could play at Charlie’s house, and she seems mystified by the suggestion. And yet later on when she arrives with a tennis racket, Charlie has honestly no idea what she’s holding it for.

I could also not have guessed how significant a packet of rice could be in so many scenes, but the way it weaves its way through the script was hilarious, fucking hilarious. I hesitate to call it clever again because that has smart arse connotations, but it is a clever script that knows how best to serve its characters.

I loved it, but then I’m a cheap date. Give me a story on a gloomy isle, with fuck up musicians and quirky loners, and the sublime Carey Mulligan if only for a while, and a strange yet comforting tale of longing, grief and never letting go, and I’ll cry you a few tears and call it a good night out.

8 times don’t take the money and run out of 10

--
“Houston, we have chutney, and that is not a problem.” – yes, he is pretty annoying, but he is footing the bills - The Ballad of Wallis Island