Midwinter Break Movie Review

“Midwinter Break” is based on an acclaimed international bestselling novel of the same name by Bernard MacLaverty. It’s a deep story, but in the beginning, the movie plods along so slowly that it’s hard to get its audience back. ​
The story is exploratory about a retired couple Stella (Lesley Manville) and her husband, Gerry (Ciarán Hinds), who no longer have meaningful conversations with one another and whose only child, son Michael, no longer lives at home.

After she goes to mass alone, she does some thinking and books them on a trip to Amsterdam. She seems to have an ulterior motive for going, one she finally shares with him, along with how she has felt about him and their relationship for a very long time. He crawls into a bottle almost every night, while she quietly suffers a spiritual crisis. Their lives have become routine, and they don’t spend much time having meaningful conversations. He has clearly forgotten how to have those. There are problems, but there’s a meaningful, tender moment that’s nice to see, but it’s too late. She has decided that what she now needs in life is to stay in Amsterdam and pay a debt that she has owed to God for a long time. When she was pregnant, Stella got shot in the stomach. She prayed for the baby in her womb to survive. If it did, she would devote her life to God. The bullet passed through; the only damage done was that she could never again have a child. Having not kept her pledge, she considers herself a failure in life. She announces that she now questions her very purpose in the world. She wants to live a more devout life… not the one she and her uninterested husband have been living. This means leaving him behind.

What is slowly revealed is that they both hate themselves, and in that, they’re going through the motions of hiding that from the other. All comes to a head on their way back home, which may no longer be their home. It takes one to be strong enough to hold the relationship together or it’s over. Do either of them want their marriage to succeed, or is it time to move on to new lives? You have to watch these marvelous performances for the answer to that question.

I’m glad this was short because we’ve seen this story before, and it’s tedious to watch yet another director tell it. When you first meet this couple, you want to know the characters better, but about thirty minutes in, you’re starting to lose interest. The script doesn’t do the author justice, even though he’s one of the people who wrote the screenplay. The movie is predictable, it’s too slow, but see it if you like Hinds and Manville. They’re legends in their craft and, with a better director, might have made this something you’d recommend to everyone else.