Ondine: Critic Reviews

Women tend to hide secrets in the original scripts of filmmaker Neil Jordan.

In Ondine, a film about a fisherman and a mythical sea creature, Neil Jordan shows his fondness for fantasy worlds.

You'll need a soft spot for this kind of whimsy, and mine sadly is like reinforced concrete.

Silkies aren't the only creatures who can inhabit two worlds. As Annie knows, and as Jordan's film makes clear, stories enable us to step outside the quotidian world and dream, if only for an hour or two.

Among the film's pleasures is a disarmingly tender performance from the new, improved Colin Farrell.

Writer/director Neil Jordan gradually builds up the possibility of fairy-tale magic in an identifiably real world, and then systematically knocks it down.

Why is the dialogue so muffled and clipped that it's hard to understand? Why didn't Mr. Jordan spend more time grounding his self-enchanted script in some semblance of reality?

Jordan starts to tell an intriguing tale about living with fantasy but falls back on plot turns cued to the flashing lights of cops and paramedics.

The characters' needs are so simple they're almost mysterious, and the story traces an elusive line between fond fantasy and harsh reality.

Full of melancholy and blarney...

Ondine is so good it hurts.

I doubt if it has much commercial appeal, but even with its flaws, it could be fresh and offbeat enough to please discerning art-house audiences who ask for more with their Irish breakfast tea than a water biscuit.

If only the film had stuck with its fairy-tale story. Instead, the final 30 minutes turn into a bloody thriller with a tacked-on happy ending.

Some complexities of story will be lost on audiences not tuned to the regional Irish brogue that is the mother tongue of this little fishing community. But Christopher Doyle's dark lush photography plucks the green coast of Cork like a harp.

A lyrical, if slight, breeze of an Irish fable.

Intoxicatingly beautiful...

There is enough saving grace on these craggy shores to let the mists and the legends roll in and envelop you for a while.

An Irish selkie tale for adults.

Understated in its subversion of, and then canny adherence to, its chosen folklore

A fairy tale for adults from Neil Jordan

full review at Movies for the Masses

He's an Irishman, she's a seal. It'll never work.

An imperfect film, but it's the kind of imperfect film with staying power.

Ondine works OK when it's trying to be a romantic fantasy. Screenwriter/director Neil Jordan can't leave well enough alone, though. His fable suddenly turns dark and nasty in the final third, when it becomes a thriller.