Midwinter Break review – sad, spiky and brilliantly acted portrait of rupture and rapture

Movies about ageing empty-nesters going on a bittersweet holiday and unexpectedly having to confront something about their relationship are common enough. Roger Michell’s Le Week-End starred Jim Broadbent and Lindsay Duncan as an oldster couple having a Eurostar break in Paris; and in Paolo Virzì’s sucrose The Leisure Seeker, Donald Sutherland and Helen Mirren impulsively head off in a Winnebago. There is often something soft and fuzzy and depressing in the wrong way about these films’ lenient sunset-sentimentalism – but not so with Polly Findlay’s fiercely sad, spiky and wonderfully acted film, based on a novel by Bernard MacLaverty (the author of Cal).

Gerry and Stella, played by Ciarán Hinds and Lesley Manville, are a late-middle-aged couple from Northern Ireland who left for Scotland in the 1970s, traumatised by the Troubles, and are taking a restorative midwinter break in Amsterdam. They appear perfectly happy and affectionate, but Gerry has a drinking problem and Stella feels lonely because Gerry does not share her Catholic faith. In Amsterdam, Stella is struck with epiphanic rapture at the peaceful beauty of the Begijnhof, the city’s enclosed 14th-century courtyard that historically housed unmarried Catholic women who wanted to devote themselves to God.

Stella realises that she wants nothing more than to live there as well. She can suddenly see, with pitiless clarity, how she has always hated Gerry’s genial mockery of her religion; perhaps she has always hated him, too. And she confesses to Kathy (Niamh Cusack), an Irish expatriate in the city, a terrible secret about her time in Northern Ireland that she has never told anyone.

Perhaps there is something a little bit straightforward about making the Troubles a keynote moment in the past for Northern Irish characters, though for a certain generation it is plausible enough. The film creates space for Hinds and Manville to give substantial, intimate, complex performances of the kind that most movies (of whatever sort) do not allow their leads, and Manville in particular is very moving.