Tim Key and Tom Basden stretch their 2007 short into a small, funny, damp film about a folk duo reunited on a Welsh island for an audience of one. The chatter wears in places; the songs and Carey Mulligan hold it together.
Herb McGwyer (Tom Basden) is a folk singer whose good years are behind him, and he has taken a boat to a small Welsh island because Charles Heath (Tim Key) won the lottery and wants to spend some of it on a private concert. Charles talks constantly, mostly in puns, and Herb wants the money and the boat home. Then Nell Mortimer (Carey Mulligan) arrives. She is the other half of the duo Herb used to be in, and the other half of a relationship he has not finished with, and Charles has booked them both and not mentioned it to Herb. That is the whole film, and it is a good one: funnier than the set-up promises, sadder than you expect, and a little worn by the end.
Basden and Key have stretched their own 2007 short to 100 minutes, and James Griffiths directs it without padding. The script has one engine, which is that Charles cannot bear a silence and Herb cannot bear Charles. Key makes this work far longer than it should. Charles offers tea before Herb is out of his wet clothes, answers questions nobody asked and narrates his own walk to the kitchen. Key plays him as a man who has learned to fill every gap because of what lives in the gaps, and the film gets round to what that is in its own time.
G. Magni Ágústsson shoots the island in the weather it actually has. The sky is low, the grass is wet, the sea is the colour of pewter and nobody’s hair is dry for long. Alexandra Toomey’s production design gives Charles a house crammed with records and framed things, with a kitchen holding more mugs than one man could use. Gabriela Yiaxis puts Herb in a black jacket the island does not want and Charles in waterproofs he barely takes off. Quin Williams cuts to let the awkward pauses sit, and Adem Ilhan’s score stays out of the way, so that when a guitar starts you notice.
The songs are the reason it holds. Basden and Mulligan sing them straight, in full, without cutaways to anyone being moved, and they are good enough that the film’s claim that this duo once mattered is not a stretch. The first time the two of them sing together, in Charles’s front room, we stopped waiting for the next joke and did not notice we had stopped. It was the harmony that did it, and the look on Basden’s face when it came back to him. Mulligan plays Nell as a woman who left this life on purpose and is not sorry, and she is warm without being soft. She is also given less than she deserves. Akemnji Ndifornyen, as Michael, gets less still, and Sian Clifford is funny in every scene she has as Amanda and is in too few of them.
The problems are the ones you would guess. Charles’s patter drives the film and also slows it, and there is a stretch in the middle where the same joke arrives for the fourth time and we felt our patience thin. The last movement leans on feeling harder than it needs to, with Ilhan’s music finally stepping forward to make sure. And the shape of the thing is visible from the boat: two people who once made something together are put on an island and asked to talk. We knew where it was going. We were still glad when it got there.
Small British comedies about damp men in remote places have a long tradition and a low hit rate, and this one is nearer the top of it than the bottom. It is kind, and it knows the difference between a laugh and a lesson, which is more than most in the genre manage. Most critics have landed about where we have.
Watch it with someone you used to make things with, or at least someone who will not talk over the songs. Charles would.
