Ivan Radford | On 24, Aug 2025

Director: James Griffiths
Cast: Tim Key, Tom Basden, Carey Mulligan, Sian Clifford
Certificate: 12

“They’re just songs, Herb.” “They’re our songs.” That’s Nell Mortimer (Carey Mulligan) and Herb McGwyer (Tom Basden), aka McGwyer Mortimer, a folk duo reuniting 15 years after they last played together. They’re brought back into each other’s lives by their biggest fan, Charles (Tim Key), who offers them a cool half a million pounds to play a private gig for his birthday. The only catch? He lives by himself on a remote Welsh island. And he’s the only member of the audience. And Herb doesn’t know it’s a reunion.

In the years since they last saw each other, Herb has pursued a solo career, his music becoming increasingly mainstream and less successful. Nell has stopped writing music and married Michael (Akemnji Ndifornyen), an American who loves bird-watching and making chutney. The only person who has continued to play their songs – on a battered old record player – is Charles, who has his own personal reasons for his attachment to their work. His orchestrated collision of these estranged souls cues up a thoughtful and moving journey back to the foreign country of the past.

The soundtrack, naturally, is central to it all, and Tom Basden composes some wonderfully melancholic songs for the fictional duo, which have just enough twee lyrics to charm and just enough harmonies to enchant. Basden and Mulligan – who delivered a mic-dropping musical turn in Steve McQueen’s Shame – duet gorgeously together, at once heartfelt and warm and painfully bittersweet. From the moment the pair sit down to rehearse, it’s clear that there is still a natural chemistry between them – not just emotional, but creative. It’s rare for a film or TV show to capture the unique spark that can tie artists together – The Ballad of Wallis Island would make an excellent double-bill with Daisy Jones and the Six or Sing Street – and the script (by Basden and Key) beautifully explores the power of connection that music holds: connections with others and connections with your own emotions and memories.

As they revisit familiar lyrics and half-forgotten chords, Herb and Nell connect differently with their old selves – she remembers the fun and the frustrations of their partnership as something long ago, while he finds himself immersed in it all once more. How far can you separate out a song from the life and feelings you experienced when you first heard it? Why do we listen to music in the first place if we divorce it from those things?

These are the kind of questions that resonate through the film, with the answers left unspoken but not necessarily unsung. It’s success lies in how it entwines that with the power the past can hold over us – whether it’s a past we long for, we want to leave behind or we want to remember as a rose-tinted, ethereal thing away from the reality of a person or situation. Basden’s prickly performance finds the harmony between all those, as he reluctantly recalls the man and artist he used to be. Mulligan’s understated turn provides the notes needed to counter his unhappy key, even as he tries to transpose his life’s melody on to hers – and she rediscovers her own creative voice.

But it’s Tim Key who emerges as the beating heart of the ensemble, as he riffs on his pun-filled persona to ground the events in character more than comedy. That’s not to say he isn’t hilarious – he is laugh-out-loud funny as he comments on every little thing that happens, always able to find the awkwardly amusing grace note in any chord. But he is also heartbreaking and vulnerable, as he peels back the layers of a man who is so scared of silence that he constantly strives to fill it. (“To paraphrase the Beatles, there goes the sun,” he chirps as the sun goes down.) And, as we see how music might bring together him and the island’s shopkeeper (Sian Clifford), he finds hope amid his loneliness.

It’s a role that’s perfect for Key, and deserves to make him more of a household name outside his particularly comedy niche. It’s no surprise, then, that the script is an expansion of his and Basden’s 2007 short The One and Only Herb McGwyer Plays Wallis Island, which was nominated for a BAFTA. Adding a third voice to that ballad leads them to compose an intricate, complicated ode to grief and love, and how music can help both live on. Director James Griffiths holds space for each cast member, while immersing us in the stunning scenery of their remote location. The result is a profound and remarkably contained gem – the 100 minutes fly by in a precisely rambling manner that feels like listening to your favourite album.

Add to Watchlist