Quartile rating: 7/10 · 1 rating
On the coast of Cork, Syracuse is a divorced fisherman who has stopped drinking. His precocious daughter Annie has failing kidneys. One day, he finds a nearly-drowned young woman in his net; she calls herself Ondine and wants no one to see her. He puts her up in an isolated cottage that was his mother's. Annie discovers Ondine's presence and believes she is a selkie, a seal that turns human while on land. Syracuse is afraid to hope again.
Ondine is elevated most by its performances — Colin Farrell brings quiet, wounded sincerity to Syracuse, and Alicja Bachleda-Curus is genuinely ethereal — and by Christopher Doyle's luminous, mist-drenched photography of the Cork coastline, which gives the film a mythic, waterlogged beauty. The plot blends fairy-tale magic-realism with gritty Irish realism effectively for much of its runtime, and the daughter Annie's kidney-disease subplot grounds the fantasy with real emotional stakes. However, the ending deflates much of the carefully built enchantment: the third-act revelation is abrupt and somewhat mechanical, trading the film's dreamy ambiguity for a more conventional resolution that feels rushed and tonally jarring. Novelty sits at a modest level — while the selkie myth is a lovely touch, Neil Jordan has worked this lyrical-Irish-melancholy territory before, and the film doesn't push its premise as far as it might.