On the Sea Review (Thessaloniki International Film Festival 2025)
On the Sea is like a Sunday read; as if begotten from a contemporary literary classic, this story sets out to lyrically depict how much masculinity still resides untroubled in rural areas, contaminating with isolation and remorse those who care the most.
Naturally, masculinity is most entrenched in male-dominated professions, particularly those tied to industry and chained to tradition. Such as fishing. The story takes place in North Wales, renowned for its shellfish foraging, specifically on the Anglesey coast, in the town of Amlwch. There, Jack tends to the family mussel farm together with his brother Dylan. Jack (a gentle, well-meaning face) is married to his high school sweetheart, Maggie, now a seamstress and mother to their teenage son, Tom. Together they attend church and occasionally go out. Tom is progressively crossing the permissible boundaries of aggression, Maggie is silently present and mildly pleasant, and Jack is trying to keep it together and do the right thing.
Until he runs into Daniel (or more precisely, Daniel jumps into his car), the newcomer deckhand. Amid family tensions and the claustrophobic atmosphere of the small village and the local church, Jack submits to his barred and neglected attraction to the same sex.
While the story unfolds like a tale, shifting from gloomy to sun-kissed scenes (in a visual braid that keeps you blissful in your seat), it renders imperative subjects in a setting that does not tolerate and will not excuse. Shortly after Daniel’s arrival, every corner of the village knows his habits; a fact that the sophomore film director chooses to handle without gossip or much confrontation. Instead, the objection to his sexual orientation is voiced only by Jack’s brother (a man whose face begs for the label of the antagonist.) A clever choice, since a family member of such pervasive reference and incisive influence over our main character becomes a powerful voice, enough to speak on behalf of the entire village. It is, in fact, one of the few elegant directorial moves spotted in the picture; for the majority of its runtime, the visual cues are scattered and untethered. We are welcomed into a wide, flat story laid on an open field for us to walk through, with sudden interruptions constructed as high steps we must climb to follow its course.
Director and writer Helen Walsh is a novelist to her bone: every character reveals themselves on the sudden turn of a ‘chapter,’ and by the end, we find ourselves recounting everyone by their first names (remember the Sunday read?). It’s a soothing and sweet sensation, this familiarity with the characters, aided by the insatiably kind face of Jack (Barry Ward) and the audience’s genuine desire to get closer to stories of sexual oppression. On the Sea does not offer insights into the deepest psyche of a man long repressing his desires, nor does it capture the raw, irrepressible sexual attraction that can cause earthquakes upon the first meeting of two strangers. It does not delve into the complexities of unspoken homosexuality within the frame of traditional marriage—still a plague for many families and a widely unexplored area—even if Jack does speak up: “My family is not a lie.”
Yet Walsh is spot on in aligning the environment with the need for sexual emancipation (I say this not only in regard to sexual preference but also to the social expectations that derive from sex itself), without delivering a lecture but instead a comfort story. On the Sea may surely find an audience thirsty for this kind of comfort, and that is no small feat.
This is Helen Walsh’s second attempt to amplify her stories on the big screen, following The Violators (2015).
On the Sea premiered at the 2025 Edinburgh Film Festival and had its international premiere at the Thessaloniki International Film Festival as part of the International Competition section.
★★★
On the Sea, 115’ / Dir. Writer: Helen Walsh / With: Barry Ward, Lorne MacFadyen, Liz White, Henry Lawfull, Celyn Jones / Cinematography: Sam Goldie / Production Company: Red Union Films / UK
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