Is it possible to recover from the worst tragedy imaginable? Or are there some things you just can’t handle? These are the themes of this offbeat British drama about raw grief from actor-turned-director Joseph Milson. It stars Sarah-Jane Potts as Anne, a woman in her 40s traveling alone in Lanzarote. Dressed head to toe in black and unspoiled, Anne stands out from the other vacationers. And she doesn’t speak; the notebook she uses has a page to communicate with the words: “I’m not deaf. I just don’t talk.”
From the start, it seems obvious that Anne is selectively silent—she has stopped talking, and for a terrible reason. “The deviant cannot communicate with clarity,” wrote Iris Murdoch. This is true of Anne, whose holiday reading is Murdoch’s The Sea, The Sea. In her interactions with other people, she is distant, uninvolved, or impatient and irritated. It’s a big ask for an actor to perform in silence, but Potts’s big, brown, intelligent eyes speak volumes.
But the film doesn’t have enough of that. There are no flashbacks; instead, the audience picks up the crumbs of this terrible thing that happened to Anne—the photo in her wallet, the business card. She’s accidentally dumped with Bill, a big Irishman played sympathetically by David Gunn. Socially awkward and good-natured, Bill is also on vacation, a trip he planned as a treat for the kids after a messy divorce. Where Anne doesn’t speak, Bill can’t stop, and there are awkward, funny moments when he blabs. It’s an interesting idea, but the script struggles to navigate the complexity of Anne’s grief, and ultimately it doesn’t quite hang together.
