Patagonia

There’s a fascinating movie to be made about the Welsh settlement in Patagonia, an isolated community clinging to the language and traditions of its homeland. But Marc Evans’s drab, soap opera-like melodrama, which tracks two pairs of characters as they make life-altering trips across the Atlantic, is not that movie. While troubled Welsh couple Gwen (Nia Roberts) and Rhys (Matthew Gravelle) bicker their way across the pampas, elderly Cerys (Marta Lubos), born to a Welsh mother, brings her teenage neighbour Alejandro (Nahuel Pérez Biscayart) back to Wales to find her family homestead. Evans’s eye for landscape is impressive, and there are some gorgeous moments, contrasting the sparse quiet of the high desert with the lush green of the valleys. But his focus on this quartet of dull cardboard cutouts makes the film predictable and tedious, and it all wraps up in an unconvincing would-be emotional climax.