‘The Ballad of Wallis Island’ Review: A Minor Chord Comedy That Works

A carefully considered mix of humor and melancholy glows in the fragile sunshine that bathes an isolated Welsh coastline in The Ballad of Wallis Island, a wan yet affecting consideration of lost love, forgotten bands and the odd ways those entities manifest themselves in our hearts and on our turntables.

Designed as showcase for the minor chord comedy of its writers and stars Tom Basden and Tim Key, the film tells the story of an unlikely reunion of McGwyer Mortimer. A long-estranged duo that was once the top British folk act of 2014, the pair reconvene on a remote island at the behest of one of its very few residents, Charles (Key), a Candide-like former nurse who boasts little more than time, money, a wicked tennis serve and rapidly fading memories of a happier past he shared with his wife Marie, who died five years earlier. 

The source of the moolah, not unlike the cause of his still fresh heartache, was a random act of God: he won the lottery, not once, but twice. Charles pays the pair with suitcases filled with pound notes, hers considerably lighter than his. Herb McGwyer (Basden) had spent the decade since the break-up crafting cheesy solo albums while Nell Mortimer (a shabby chic Carey Mulligan) moved to Portland to make small batch chutney and live a quiet life with her husband Michael (Akemnji Ndifornyen), a birder who tags along on in hopes of spotting the puffins that gather on the island’s north side.

Three-time Oscar nominee Mulligan, luminous as always, gets a bit of a short shrift here. This is very much a two-hander about emotionally adrift men rediscovering an inner flame that pretty much extinguished around the time Fleabag was a hit. (Sian Clifford, best known as Fleabag’s sister Claire, is on hand as the island’s lone shopkeeper.)

Both Basden and Key are well up to the challenge, especially Key. Equally overbearing and demure, his Charles is both a dream and a nightmare of a host, a leaking teapot of bad jokes and awkward observations. The comic rhythm he shares with Basden—a very precise iteration of entitled yet aggrieved—is wondrous, like a lo-fi Abbott and Costello. 

Basden also supplies the music for the fictitious band, penning over 20 tunes that touchingly, if perhaps furtively, put one in the mind of Nick Drake and Gillian Welch. While these are not exactly tracks that one can imagine inspiring the absurd depth of Charles’ obsession (his collection of McGwyer Mortimer memorabilia includes a lock of Nell’s hair he purchased off the internet), the moments where Key watches them being sung in front of him, the camera focused on his eyes as he traverses the beautiful and painful past they evoke, are deeply moving.  

With slightly catchier tunes, The Ballad of Wallis Island would pair nicely with a certain other doleful comedy about an embittered folk act that co-stared Carey Mulligan: the Coen brothers’ 2013 Inside Llewyn Davis. Indeed, you half expect a freezing cold Oscar Isaac to wash ashore holding a cat.

But where that film could never quite shake off its directors’ calculated cynicism, television director James Griffiths (Episodes)—who also helmed The One and Only Herb McGwyer Plays Wallis Island, the Basden and Key 2007 short on which this film was based—leans hard on the story’s tenderness and vulnerability. By and large, the sincerity pays off.

Like the damp, knitted cardigans favored by Charles, this cottage-core musical, while not always comfortable, still manage to keep us warm.