Is it possible to recover after the worst imaginable tragedy? Or are there some things that you just can’t get over? These are the themes of this muted British drama about raw grief from actor turned director Joseph Millson. It stars Sarah-Jane Potts as Anne, a woman in her 40s travelling alone in Lanzarote. Dressed head to toe in black, and unsmiling, Anne stands out from the other holidaymakers. And she doesn’t talk; there is a page in the notebook she uses to communicate with the words: “I’m not deaf. I just don’t speak.”
From the start, it seems obvious that Anne is selectively mute – she has stopped talking, and there is a terrible reason for this. “The bereaved cannot communicate with the unbereaved,” wrote Iris Murdoch. This is true for Anne, whose holiday read is Murdoch’s The Sea, The Sea. In her interactions with other people, she is remote, unengaged, or impatient and irritated. It’s a big ask for an actor to perform in silence, but Potts’s big, brown, intelligent eyes speak volumes.
