my sailor my love movie reviews

My Sailor, My Love

At the heart of “My Sailor, My Love,” the English language debut from Finnish filmmaker Klaus Härö , is a prickly tale of familial love gone sour and romantic love found almost too late. Although it attempts to tackle the heavy theme of generational trauma, it too often forgoes the more insightful aspects of its family drama in favor of an overly trite twilight romance.

Härö opens his film at group therapy, where women open up to each other about their life traumas. When it’s time for Grace ( Catherine Walker ) to share, she clams up, unable to voice what has brought her to the group. The film then shifts to a sweeping tracking shot of coastal Ireland, following Grace’s car to an isolated home right on the seashore. 

Here, we meet her cantankerous father, Howard ( James Cosmo ), a widowed sea captain who spends his days weaving and telling tall tales. It’s his birthday party, but Howard hasn’t even finished washing the dirty laundry he left in the sink. Her brothers arrive with tales of trips abroad but don’t bother to help Grace with the festivities. Howard even refuses to eat a slice of the elaborate chocolate cake Grace brought. It’s clear Grace’s traumas stem from the unhealthy dynamics at play in this splintered family. 

Fed up with his mess, Grace posts an ad at the local pub for a housekeeper, almost immediately hiring the gregarious older woman Annie ( Bríd Brennan ). When Annie cooks and cleans and chats about her grandkids, the gruff Howard insults her, and she leaves. Only to, of course, be wooed back by Howard’s apology and a bouquet of flowers. 

The rest of the film cuts back and forth between Grace’s disintegrating life as she loses her job and her husband and Howard and Annie’s burgeoning relationship. It’s the stuff of high melodrama but mostly played at a very muted pace. Grace and her husband have calm, cooled, collected fights rather than rage. Howard and Annie fall for each other through small, shared moments. 

While this all sounds very mature, the execution, especially with the romance, sorely lacks in subtlety. At one point, while picking apples, Howard and Annie reach for the same apple, and their hands graze. There is no hint of irony in how this hackneyed moment is filmed or employed. Aside from a little bit of chemistry and his ability to make her grandkids laugh, it’s hard to see what Annie sees in Howard. In fact, both characters are developed with such broad strokes, their personalities and histories so vague, what depth they contain comes solely from what Cosmo and Brennan bring with their quietly calibrated performances. 

Grace is at least given a much richer personal history, which is slowly teased out. At first, it seems she is just overprotective and controlling of her father’s life. Then, she appears jealous, as she reacts poorly to Howard’s relationship with Annie and the joy he seems to take in becoming part of Annie’s large, boisterous family. But eventually, we realize this growing tension between Grace and Howard stems from a lifetime of neglect and emotional abuse. Her pain from the kind of unique wounds that can only be inflicted by a parent on their child. 

Walker has the most difficult role here. Without alienating the audience, she must show Grace’s hurt, especially her anger. She does this mostly through body language; her constricted breathing clearly holding back years of anguish. Early on, her clipped sentences cut off just when she says something in mixed company that would make her appear to be the bad guy. It’s a dance she’s practiced for years, a trick anyone in this kind of abusive familial relationship knows all too well. When she does slip and say a little too much, it’s like she’s snuffed out oxygen for everyone in the room. And yet, there’s always a little bit of love left, stinging as it sticks in the back of her throat. 

“My Sailor, My Love” is at its best in these moments where it explores Grace’s pain—when it shows how it has poisoned her ability to relate to others, be it the other women in group therapy, her co-workers, her husband, or even herself. 

Unfortunately, because it also wants to be about the healing power of romantic love, Grace’s more nuanced storyline is shelved for long periods in favor of the more clichéd romantic beats of Howard and Annie’s story. And while their story wraps up in as mawkish a way as can be, at least “My Sailor, My Love” knows the final emotional beat belongs to Grace. It’s just too bad the filmmakers weren’t brave enough to make the whole film about her story, too.

Now playing in theaters. 

Marya E. Gates

Marya E. Gates is a freelance film and culture writer based in Los Angeles and Chicago. She studied Comparative Literature at U.C. Berkeley, and also has an overpriced and underused MFA in Film Production. Other bylines include Moviefone, The Playlist, Crooked Marquee, Nerdist, and Vulture. 

• James Cosmo as Howard
• Brid Brennan as Annie
• Catherine Walker as Grace
• Nora-Jane Noone as Kelly
• Aidan O’Hare as Martin
• Gina Costigan as Joyce
• Molly McCann as Alison
• Jimmy Karlsson
• Kirsi Vikman
• Michelino Bisceglia
• Philippe Ravoet

Cinematographer

• Robert Nordström

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‘My Sailor, My Love’ Review: When Romance Comes Ashore

A grumpy man warms to a good-natured housekeeper in this film directed by Klaus Haro.

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By Amy Nicholson

Howard (James Cosmo), the Irish widower and retired sea captain of Klaus Haro’s bittersweet drama “My Sailor, My Love,” is furious that his daughter has hired a good-natured housekeeper named Annie (Brid Brennan), to disturb his seclusion. At first, the grump does his best to scare off the invader. “Never darken my door again!” he thunders old-fashionedly, as though he’s subconsciously aware that the writers Kirsi Vikman and Jimmy Karlsson are drawing on centuries of love stories about savage men and civilizing women. The production designer John Hand has even worked in a nod to the rose from “Beauty and the Beast.”

The curveball is that after rushing the romance (the brute is tamed in a week!), Haro shifts his attention back to the daughter, Grace (Catherine Walker), who is unfairly, but understandably, aggrieved. Her father’s always treated her cruelly — how dare he be kind to someone else?! Grace’s resentment is an astute twist. Imagine Disney’s singing teapot enrolling in primal scream therapy, except when Grace attends a support group for women who’ve given too much, she can’t let out her steam.

Life, and the film’s costume design, haven’t been fair to Walker’s self-sacrificing miserablist. (When can we stop dressing this kind of character in wan beige and headache-inducing braids?) Every one of her scenes is an indignity overemphasized by a strings and piano score that needs to ease up. The painful dynamic is credible; the dialogue not so much. Still, the actors are in full command of our empathy, especially Brennan’s gray-haired caretaker who, when she cracks open her heart, seems to glow from within.

My Sailor, My Love Not rated. Running time: 1 hour 43 minutes. In theaters.

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