Life
The Ballad of Wallis Island review: ‘hits the sweet spot’ ★★★★★
This gently strummed folk take will make your heart sing
June 12, 2025 15:49
This gently strummed folk take will make your heart sing
June 12, 2025 15:49In this delightful film the huge and bruised ego of a once-successful musician encounters its opposite – a fan with no ego at all and whose love for the music is pure and unconditional.
Meet Charles (Tim Key), a wealthy loner who has invited his favourite band, an estranged folk duo, to reform for a concert on the shore of the wild (though fictional) Wallis Island where Charles lives on his own in a rambling Arts and Crafts pile.
Meet Herb McGwyer (Tom Basden) for whom accepting the massive fee for the gig might feel like selling out, but half a million quid goes a long way to covering the costs of the next solo album. He has been recording on his own for decades now, ever since he split up with Nell, the essential harmonising part of his only real success.
Meet Nell (Carey Mulligan) who is no longer in the music business. Herb didn’t know she was coming until he sees the woman he still loves disembarking from the wobbly little ferry just as as he did the previous day. Only unlike him she doesn’t fall in the sea.
If they haven’t already, someone is going to make a horror movie from this premise: rich superfan invites the band he worships to play for him and only him at his secluded homestead. Perhaps he realises his dream of joining the group with his own instrument – a chainsaw. Although recent horror thriller Opus starring John Malkovich flipped that scenario and saw Malkovich’s pop god inviting fans to his isolated homestead to witness his comeback, before he and his cult followers go psycho.
But no. Key and Basden’s film, which has developed their Bafta-nominated short of 2007, is the opposite of horror. It is a beautifully wry, gentle collision of personality types. Basden’s McGwyer exudes aloof impatience with people like Key’s jovial Charles who is relentlessly enthusiastic.
Mulligan’s better-adjusted Nell is more than a cameo but ultimately it is the plot that Key and Basden have written for their characters that hits the sweet spot here. Deftly directed by James Griffiths, what the two writers/performers deliver are deeply moving character studies.
The Ballard of Wallis Island
Certificate: 12A