Ondine

Neil Jordan is a terrific director, with movies like The Crying Game and Mona Lisa. Here he tries to mix myth with reality, and it doesn’t quite work, but it’s good up until the very end. Colin Farrell is a small-time fisherman in a small Irish village. One day he hauls in a beautiful woman (Alicja Bachleda-Curuś), near death, in his nets. She doesn’t want to be seen by anyone. His daughter (a very good child actress named Alison Barry), who is in a wheelchair and is getting dialysis while waiting for a kidney, convinces herself that the woman is a selkie, which is a seal that can shed its skin and become human. It all goes along so nicely, with wonderful photography and spooky atmosphere, that it was a sad surprise to me to find out how mundane and uninteresting the real story is.