Film review: Albatross

CALL a movie Albatross and it’s immediately freighted with oppressive meaning as surely as if you’d called it He Hates Her, She Hates Him – Will They Ever Get Along?

ALBATROSS (15)

Director: Niall MacCormick

Running time: 88 minutes

* * *

There’s not much subtlety to the rest of Niall McCormick’s film either, which focuses on a family running a guest house in a sleepy seaside town who are bent out of shape when they employ a new cleaner, a mouthy teen called Emilia (Jessica Brown Findlay) who claims to be a descendant of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.

Mrs Fischer (Julia Ormond), an untamed shrew of a woman, is exasperated by Emilia’s bolshiness, as she is by her feckless husband and life generally since giving up an acting career in order to take room bookings instead. However, Mr Fischer (Sebastian Koch from The Lives Of Others) is enchanted by the new employee, since he’s a middle aged man with writer’s block, a mid-life crisis and a porn habit. But Emilia makes the biggest impression on their bookish 17-year-old daughter Beth (Chalet Girl’s Felicity Jones, below) because she seems cool and fearless and at home with sex, alcohol and boys.

Actually, Beth is right to be enchanted by Brown Findlay, who first came to attention as part of Downton Abbey’s polished potboiler and is absolutely the best thing in Albatross, which has all the fresh unpredictability of porridge. Even though Emelia is a familiar type, an enabling character who is more of a catalyst than a character, Brown Findlay invests her with energy and a glittering watchability.

If you saw Emily Lloyd make an equally exuberant debut in Wish You Were Here, Albatross may feel like a re-run with different actors, a different locale and a few new twists. Even without the memory of Lloyd, Albatross is not much more than a TV movie, competent, coherent, classy but also prone to more doldrums than Rime of the Ancient Mariner.

On general release from Friday