X
- 2025
- PG-13
- Focus Features
- 1 h 39 m
- 2025
- PG-13
- Focus Features
- 1 h 39 m
Summary Charles (Tim Key), an eccentric lottery winner, lives alone on a remote island and dreams of getting his favorite musicians, McGwyer Mortimer (Tom Basden & Carey Mulligan) back together. His fantasy turns into reality when the bandmates and former lovers accept his invitation to play a private show at his home on Wallis Island. Old tensi...
Directed By: James Griffiths
Written By: Tom Basden, Tim Key
- 2025
- PG-13
- Focus Features
- 1 h 39 m
- 2025
- PG-13
- Focus Features
- 1 h 39 m
The Ballad of Wallis Island
78
7.6
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Summary Charles (Tim Key), an eccentric lottery winner, lives alone on a remote island and dreams of getting his favorite musicians, McGwyer Mortimer (Tom Basden & Carey Mulligan) back together. His fantasy turns into reality when the bandmates and former lovers accept his invitation to play a private show at his home on Wallis Island. Old tensi...
Directed By: James Griffiths
Written By: Tom Basden, Tim Key
Where to Watch
Coming Soon
Not available in your country?
ExpressVPN
Get 3 Extra months free
$6.67/mth
Top Cast
Metascore
Generally Favorable Based on 34 Critic Reviews
78
94% Positive
32 Reviews
32 Reviews
3% Mixed
1 Review
1 Review
3% Negative
1 Review
1 Review
Metascore
Generally Favorable Based on 34 Critic Reviews
78
94% Positive
32 Reviews
32 Reviews
3% Mixed
1 Review
1 Review
3% Negative
1 Review
1 Review
Apr 3, 2025
It’s a lovely, quirky tale, full of ruminations on regret, love coming from (and directed to) unexpected quarters, and a bizarre broken faucet that won’t not work.
Jan 28, 2025
Alive with plenty of droll British humor and with a music-filled, picturesque finale that is sincerely earned, The Ballad of Wallis Island is the best kind of crowd-pleaser: disarming, joyful and full of compassion for its oddball characters. This Sundance charmer doesn’t hit a false note.
User Score
Generally Favorable Based on 48 User Ratings
7.6
83% Positive
40 Ratings
40 Ratings
13% Mixed
6 Ratings
6 Ratings
4% Negative
2 Ratings
2 Ratings
User Score
Generally Favorable Based on 48 User Ratings
7.6
83% Positive
40 Ratings
40 Ratings
13% Mixed
6 Ratings
6 Ratings
4% Negative
2 Ratings
2 Ratings
Apr 16, 2025
Beneath its tender guise of reunion, The Ballad of Wallis Island reveals itself as something else entirely— a quiet ode to a grief so profound it orchestrates joy as a séance. The music is not performed for an audience, nor even for the players themselves. It is a hymn for absence—a melody offered into the void, hoping it echoes back. Grief wears many faces, but the cruelest one is joy. That is the quiet thesis humming beneath the surface of The Ballad of Wallis Island—a film so unassuming in its indie-folk garb, it nearly fools you into thinking it's about reconciliation and rekindled love. But like all good hauntings, this one disguises itself in warmth. The premise is the kind you might find on a weathered CD jacket from 2006: a musician and their ex-lover, once bandmates, now estranged, are lured to a mysterious private island under dubious pretenses. There are acoustic guitars. There are clumsy toasts. There is the scent of unfinished business wafting from every syllable not spoken. But this isn’t a reunion. It’s a reckoning. At first, the story misleads us with whimsy—lottery winnings (twice!), an island estate seemingly plucked from the fever dream of a retired magician, and a premise so absurd it loops back around to sincerity. The viewer is lulled into complicity, and that is Wallis Island’s sleight-of-hand: its fiction is convincing not because it is plausible, but because it is needed by the characters. The fantasy is less about escapism and more about scaffolding—the elaborate delusion erected to keep someone from collapsing. Enter the architect of this illusion: Charles Heath, portrayed by Tim Key. This man is not the center of the film, but he is its abyss. Cloaked in cheer, wielding puns like talismans, he orchestrates joy the way a mortician might arrange a smile on a corpse. And beneath it—just beneath it—is the unmistakable rot of grief. The cinematography conspires with him. While the central duo—Herb McGwyer (Tom Basden) and Nell Mortimer (Carey Mulligan)—exchange recriminations and minor chords, Charles floats on the periphery: in kitchens, in empty hallways, gazing too long at pictures no longer on the walls. His loneliness isn’t announced; it seeps. Silence pursues him like a debt collector, and in the void, he chatters. He performs delight as a form of resistance—or perhaps as an exorcism. But it is in the climactic scene—the concert, the ostensible catharsis—that the film detonates its emotional payload. The music swells. The fire swirls. Yet the camera holds not on the stage, but on him. And it is in his eyes we witness the true concert: not of sound, but of memory. The auditory landscape fractures, folding into fragments of laughter, touch, shared silence. We hear the song as he hears it—not in the present, but in a cruel echo chamber of joy long extinguished. That moment—that refusal to let us bask in the triumphant "return" of the band, and instead shackle us to a grieving man’s reverie—is the film’s masterstroke. It reconfigures everything. What we thought was a subplot was in fact the marrow. The film was never about the exes. It was about the man who built a stage just to feel her presence one last time. The music isn’t for us. It isn’t even for them. It is for the ghost. And somehow, in witnessing his unhealed wound, the other characters are able to name their own. Herb, once irritating in his faux-profundity, becomes devastating in his naked yearning. His apology is not eloquent. It is true. He begs not for forgiveness, but for time to be undone, and when it isn’t, he breaks beautifully. We don’t come to love him, but we come to recognize him—and that is rarer. Nell, by contrast, is not some prize to be won, but a woman trying to make peace with the fact that closure does not always come gift-wrapped in reconciliation. Her arc is quiet, mature, and cruelly real. She walks away not because she doesn’t feel anything, but because she does. What emerges is not a tale of lovers reunited, but of losses reframed. The Ballad of Wallis Island is about letting go in the face of love that once defined you. It argues that the past, no matter how melodic, cannot be re-performed—only remembered. And in that memory, perhaps, a softer future can be written.
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May 15, 2025
One more example that big things come in small packages. A story perhaps slow but clever and with the typical recipe of British humour. It is enjoyable to watch and the last act leaves a good taste in the mouth.
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May 30, 2025
We’re stuck with Key, a stand-up virtuoso who is thankfully amazing playing a windbag who can’t read the room – a ludicrous ruiner of sunsets, or any other vaguely peaceful moment.
Oct 20, 2025
The performances are spot on. And all involved have made a marvelously melancholy “feel good” movie that ticks off so many Brit film boxes — eccentric characters, quaint and soggy setting, emotions kept under wraps and a charming, wistful story about moving on, being smart enough to realize the need for it and kind enough to help others manage it as well.
Mar 8, 2025
The Ballad of Wallis Island plays both its drama and comedy in decidedly minor keys, straining neither for grand emotional revelations nor big laughs.
Jan 27, 2025
The Ballad of Wallis Island is effortless in its execution and breezy in its pacing, which makes its emotional undertones all the more surprising and affecting.
Jan 27, 2025
It’s a cute premise that ultimately gets wrung so dry that you’re left waiting for it to finally stop. The majority of its jokes either land flat or are run into the ground. Even worse, it pulls on the heartstrings with such force and impatience that the audience manipulation is palpable in every painfully predictable scene.
Nov 4, 2025
A good, heartfelt movie carried by a breakout performance by Tim Key.......
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Jun 23, 2025
It's hard for me to call this film "powerful", because it plays so effortlessly and spontaneously. But as the final credits roll, you're left basking in its sweet and endearing emotional impact. I always say that either the story or the storytelling must be remarkable to make a compelling view. It's rare to get both. The story may not be remarkable, it's good, but I'm not sure it goes anywhere unique. The storytelling here, though, is remarkable. There were dozens of ways the storytelling could have not worked. Tim Key really had to thread a needle with his performance, and he nails it. Everything else needs to work, and it's excellent and fluid, but Tim is The Key. My wife fell asleep during our viewing, which (this time) is good: I get to watch this again, right away. You should too.
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Apr 10, 2025
Recapturing the past may be an enticing, seductive prospect, especially when it involves revisiting pleasant memories of days gone by. But is it realistically achievable or just wishful thinking? That’s a question posed on multiple levels in the second theatrical feature from director James Griffiths. When Charles Heath (Tim Key), a wealthy, eccentric but lonely lottery winner living by himself on a remote North Atlantic island, furtively finances a command performance of his favorite now-disbanded folk rock duo – artistic and onetime-romantic partners Herb McGwyer (Tom Basden) and Nell Mortimer (Carey Mulligan) – he hopes to relive fond memories of their once-popular musical style and recollections of the days he shared them with the love of his life. There’s just one hitch – Charles conceals more than a few important details about the true nature of his plan, revelations that take the long-estranged musical duo somewhat by surprise. But, as their stay on the island unfolds, old memories are rekindled, prompting Herb and Nell to question the choices they’ve made and whether they want to take another shot at what they once had. As a result, Charles becomes something of an impromptu, unwitting matchmaker living vicariously through his guests’ experience, enveloped in a cloak of his own bittersweet nostalgia. But, considering how the lives of all three characters have changed, can the past be brought back to life, especially now that Nell is married to an adoring husband (Akemnji Ndifornyen), Herb has moved on to new types of questionable musical projects and Charles swoons (albeit bashfully) for the owner of the island’s general store (Sian Clifford)? Indeed, memories may prove to be heartwarming to relive, but can they be effectively and authentically re-created? Those are the scenarios that play out in this warm, touching alternative romcom, one that sports a quirky vibe not unlike that found in the charming comedy classic “Local Hero” (1983) mixed with the romantic reunion storyline of “A Mighty Wind” (2003). These elements are effectively enhanced by the natural, unassuming performances of the three principals, the fine original songs composed for the film and gorgeous cinematography of the craggy, windswept Welsh island location. It’s rare these days that a romantic comedy provides viewers with anything more than prototypical heartstring-tugging emotions a la Hallmark Channel productions, but “The Ballad of Wallis Island” serves up more, giving audiences a lot to ponder beyond whether the often-predictable outcomes often associated with releases in this genre will ultimately materialize. This is a great, if not entirely standard, date movie, one that’s sure to leave viewers with their own share of fond memories, even if they aren’t necessarily the kind one might expect.
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Production Company
- Focus Features
- Baby Cow Productions
- Moxie Pictures
- BBC Studios
Release Date Mar 28, 2025
Duration 1 h 39 m
Rating PG-13
Tagline He's getting the band back together.
Awards
British Independent Film Awards
• 3 Wins & 5 Nominations
National Film Awards, UK
• 2 Nominations
SXSW Film Festival
• 1 Nomination
