Both Colin Farrell and Neil Jordan get back to their roots with Ondine, a modest Irish fable, barely more than a Sunday evening TV drama, which isn't too far from something Bill Forsyth could have made in the Eighties.
Farrell turns in an impressively unstarry performance as a rough-hewn fisherman who spends his days alone on the sea, and his nights alone in a picturesque coastal town, down the road from his ex-wife and daughter. The film opens as he hauls up one of his nets, only to find an Uma Thurman lookalike (Alicja Bachleda) in among the haddock. She claims not to remember who she is, so Farrell lets her stay in the empty cottage where his mother used to live. When his daughter hears about the catch of the day, she convinces herself that Bachleda is a magical half-woman, half-seal selkie. Farrell isn't sure what to think, but he's in no hurry to throw her back into the water.
If you're in a forgiving mood, Ondine is an affable, vaguely supernatural romance that ambles through quaint surroundings, its folksy innocence disrupted only by an insistence on getting Bachleda into lingerie whenever possible. The film takes a wrong turn in the last half hour, however, when the real world intrudes on this dreamy idyll. There are lots of questions that don't need answering as long as you're being pulled along by the tide of a fairy tale, but when you're yanked back into reality by gangsters, car crashes and kidney transplants, it's obvious that the plot has more holes than one of Farrell's fishing nets.
Source - Independent