Midwinter Break

Some movies are epics. Some are novels. Midwinter Break is, in essence, a short story. (Yes, it is adapted from a novel—by Bernard MacLaverty, who co-wrote the screenplay with playwright Nick Payne—but the book is a slim 250 pages with wide margins, so maybe more of a novella.)

The film, a first feature from esteemed English theater director Polly Findlay, has just three characters of note. Lesley Manville (Oscar-nominated for The Phantom Thread) is Stella, and Ciarán Hinds (Oscar-nominated for Belfast) is her husband, Gerry. At Christmas in Glasgow, the Irish couple’s home of many decades, Stella surprises Gerry with the gift of a midwinter vacation to Amsterdam. The rest of the film consists of that quietly rambling but eventually momentous journey. The third character is a woman named Kathy (the warm and stolid Niamh Cusack), whom Stella and Gerry meet in Amsterdam.

Midwinter Break is a quiet, methodical film, and the slow-paced first half paints in the details of the couple’s relationship, which remains loving—if a bit languid—after some 40 or 50 years, and Manville and Hinds bring to life both their deep attachment and their divisions. In the nature of a short story, their back story is scant, except for an IRA attack that wounded Stella when she was a pregnant 20-ish newlywed, and the couple’s relocation to Scotland soon after that incident.

Not surprisingly. that little-discussed brush with mortality is the seed of Stella’s undisclosed motive for visiting Amsterdam, a long-held secret that eventually ramps up the tension and gives Manville several opportunities to deliver moving, heartfelt monologues that alone are worth a visit to the multiplex. Kathy becomes Stella’s sounding board, while Gerry briefly shares his own perspectives with an Irish bartender (Tim Licata), but the spouses save their deepest feelings for a final conversation with one another, in a scene that’s a master class in the subtleties of acting.

Many lovely moments grace the film, both poetic (the couple encounters two horses on a deserted side street in a pool of light) and amusing (Stella attempts to match Gerry’s hard drinking in a pub). But for all the life-changing possibilities in the few confessional scenes, the stakes of Midwinter Break seem rather low. Perhaps it’s also a lesson in how our own deep, life-changing crises may seem at best incidental to anyone not directly involved.

Grade: B. Rated PG-13 for adult themes and suggestions of sexuality. Now playing at the Cinemark Carolina and the Regal Biltmore Grande.

(Photo: Mark de Blok/Focus Features)