Ondine

Neil Jordan has fallen into a regular pattern of late, following every trip to  Hollywood with a more personal  Irish indie. You can feel the loving care in every frame of ‘Ondine’, but that only serves to make this saccharine, crudely plotted romance feel even more misguided.

Colin Farrell plays Syracuse, a trawlerman and recovering alcoholic who pulls a mysterious, scantily clad woman (Alicja Bachleda) from the sea in his net. Bringing her to the mainland, Syracuse and his disabled daughter (the terrific Alison Barry) become convinced that the stranger, who calls herself Ondine, is in fact a mythical selkie: part woman, part seal.

These unabashed fairy-tale elements fit uncomfortably with the more earthbound elements of Jordan’s script, not to mention his  habit of getting Bachleda to shed her clothes at every opportunity. A clunky third-act shift into thriller territory only makes ‘Ondine’ more confused: ambitious and deeply felt, to be sure, but also winsome and wildly uneven.