Ondine
Neil Jordan's Ondine is a lovely picture, but it's so gentle and understated that it's attracted little attention. Unlike a lot of other summer films, it never comes at you aggressively.
The movie is derived from the German fairy tale about a water nymph (an undine) who falls in love with a fisherman. But writer-director Jordan reconstructs the story. His setting is an Irish coastal village, and the fisherman is Syracuse (Colin Farrell, in an impassioned performance). He's a recovering alcoholic whose wife, Maura (Dervla Kirwan), kicked him out when he stopped drinking, since she couldn't quit too.
One day Syracuse pulls up his net and finds a nearly drowned young woman (Alicja Bachleda) caught in it. She's terrified of being seen by anyone else, so he puts her up in the cottage he inherited from his mother. But he persuades her to come aboard his trawler, and her eerie siren song brings him phenomenal luck. He tells his daughter Annie (Alison Barry), who lives with Maura and her boyfriend, about Ondine, framing the story in the terms of legend. But Annie, who's nobody's fool, realizes that her father is talking about a real-life creature, so she ventures to the cottage to get confirmation. After reading up on supernatural water creatures at the local library, she insists the visitor is a selkie, the Scottish equivalent of an undine. Her research tells her that selkies can grant a wish to a mortal, and Annie has a big one: one of her kidneys is failing, and she needs a donor.
