On Demand Weekly

On Demand Weekly provides new movie reviews of hot movies on demand from the POV of watching from the comfort of your home. Today’s review: ALBATROSS (IFC Films).

ALBATROSS
By Cynthia Kane

I was surprised to discover ALBATROSS is Niall MacCormack’s feature film debut; he’s done so much excellent television work in the UK (“Margaret Thatcher: A Long Walk from Finchley”, “Wallander: Firewall” with Kenneth Branagh) and well, I simply assumed he’d done plenty of UK indie features as well. Not so.

Filmed on the Isle of Man, ALBATROSS is then an assured first feature with a luminous cast including two young women whom I’m certain we will see much more of in the coming years. Jessica Brown Findlay – who’s already been seen this side of the pond as the young suffragette and lefty, Lady Sybil of “Downton Abbey” - plays Emelia Conan Doyle, a local girl, wanna-be writer, convinced that she’s related to Sir Arthur, and who lives with her elderly grandparents after her mother’s suicide.

At 17 and already out of school, she comes to work as a maid in Cliff House, a B&B overlooking the Irish Sea, where she meets Beth (Felicity Jones – CEMETERY JUNCTION, LIKE CRAZY, THE TEMPEST – directed by Julie Taymor with Helen Mirren), daughter of Cliff House’s owners, Jonathan and Joa. Despite the fact that Jonathan’s played by the brilliant German actor Sebastian Koch (THE LIVES OF OTHERS) and the imitable Julia Ormond (MY WEEK WITH MARILYN, THE CURIOUS CASE OF BENJAMIN BUTTON) who plays Joa, it’s the two teens that steal the show here.

It’s their story, their movie, despite all.

Jonathan’s a writer, or was… successful in writing one great book called Cliff House (and thus the family moved here) and Joa’s a frustrated actress, who’s all but given up her career and has become a kind of stage mother to their youngest daughter. Beth’s in her last year of secondary school, is conscientious and super-studious, overly serious and longing to leave the tense and frustrating world of Cliff House, make her way to Oxford … if she’s accepted. In walks Emelia into their lives one day and nothing is again the same. Beth is entranced, captivated by Emelia’s free spirit, Jonathan is seduced and stirred out of his writer’s block by her working class spunk and beauty, Joa’s immediately angst-ridden about the influence she could have on her daughter about to leave the nest and perhaps jealous of her own youth left behind. And Emelia’s, for once, the certain of attention and thrives on it. Yet the fun, naughtiness and attention don’t last, as what she’s really longing for is a friend, which she finds in Beth.