This Week's Movie is My Sailor, My Love

Film@BirrTheatre is back for its 2023 season, bringing you the best of Irish, world and independent cinema on the theatre’s big screen.

This week, we take a trip to Achill Island. In late Summer of 2021, while Martin McDonagh and his crew were creating their Banshees masterpiece on the aforementioned island, another team was also hard at work. Made using a fraction of McDonagh’s budget, My Sailor, My Love is set in the present and tells a much more straightforward story.

Howard (James Cosmo), a retired navy captain and widower, lives alone in a house by the sea. His adult daughter Grace (Catherine Walker) lives a few hours away and hires a caretaker for her father, a lady in her mature years, Annie (Bríd Brennan). Recluse and stubborn, Howard rejects Annie's amiable company, but eventually opens his heart and gives love a final chance. Grace has her own crisis to unravel and finds her father's romance difficult.

Finnish director Klaus Härö’s English-language debut grapples with the rough currents of late-in-life regrets and generational trauma. The accomplished cast give nuanced performances, the piano score is beautiful during deeply psychological moments, and the windswept, picturesque Achill is the perfect backdrop to Walker’s portrayal of a woman on the verge of a nervous breakdown and the damage accruing from being the perpetual caretaker of the family.