Jonathan Romney 

The Sea review – ‘lugubriously literary’ adaptation of John Banville novel

Ciarán Hands is a little too insistent in his grief in this glum bereavement drama, writes Jonathan Romney
  
  


John Banville adapts his own 2005 Man Booker-winning novel as a glum bereavement drama of the rain-on-windowpanes variety. Ciarán Hinds plays a widowed art critic who returns to the scene of a sun-kissed but ultimately painful summer of his childhood – a lost world inhabited by louche bohemian adults (Natascha McElhone, Rufus Sewell, both ripe as all hell) who seem to be trapped for eternity in a Jack Vettriano painting. Hinds plays the bibulous grief a little too insistently with jowls a-quiver, but Sinéad Cusack, pithy as the dead wife, and a silky Charlotte Rampling bring some tone. Otherwise, a lugubriously literary affair.

 

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