Writers: Issy Brett, Carys Glynne and Isabel Daly
Director: Isabel Daly
Receiving its world premiere at this year’s BFI Flare Film Festival is Isabel Daly’s quirky Cornish drama about a woman who falls in love with a selkie, a mythical creature that shapeshifts between a seal and a human. Selkies are never meant to wash up on the same shore twice, but for artist Morwenna, recently split up with her girlfriend, the same selkie keeps returning.
However, as much as this is a love story and an examination of the grief experienced after the end of a love affair, Washed Up is also concerned with the gentrification of Cornish fishing towns. This is highlighted in the opening credits as Mantaraybryn’s punchy song No Economy plays. “I want to go home; I can’t afford a property. I want to go home: but someone bought the sea”, he sings, despairing of city dwellers buying second homes and renting them out on Airbnb. “Keep away from me,” he continues, “with your London money”.
Once the house in which Morwenna lives is sold, she might have some money. It’s her late grandfather’s house, and she doesn’t really want to move, but it has to be sold, and the money shared between her and her estate agent cousin. In the meantime, she shoves her belongings back into a cupboard each time Connor brings prospective buyers to the property. Connor is adamant that the house will go for the asking price.
When she’s not hawking her idiosyncratic art on a beachside table, Morwenna is learning the Cornish language on Zoom. There are only a few students on the call, and none of them seems that interested in being there. Their tutor advises them to talk around the ideas if they forget or don’t know any particular word of vocabulary. Their sessions don’t bode well for Cornish.
While all this is going on, one evening on the beach, Morwenna meets Inga, a selkie who likes reading books, any book in fact. Usually, Inga is a heartbreaker, moving on from one seaside village to another after sleeping with one of their lonely inhabitants. But Inga is taken with Morwenna, and despite her fellow selkies’ warnings, she returns to visit Morwenna often. They begin a kind of long-distance relationship as summer creeps into autumn.
Not all of the comedy lands in Washed Up. Some characters are just too stereotyped, like Sam Hunter’s avaricious Connor or the self-obsessed artist-in-residence who Morwenna hopes soon to replace. However, as the local inept fortune-teller, Crystal, Anna Lidell is very funny, and one wishes she featured more. Occasionally, the good-natured offbeat humour is reminiscent of early Channel 4 films made in the 1980s. Still, Daly is not afraid to venture into darker territory when Inga discovers that she can no longer shift into the form of a seal.
Anna Ivankovic is a very likeable Morwenna who has to balance her personal gains alongside those of the town of Mullion. Carys Glynne is the intriguing Inga who becomes as trapped as Morwenna’s grief. Satisfyingly, it’s never fully clear whether Inga is real or whether she acts as a metaphor for Morwenna’s heartbreak.
Washed Up is as inventive a film that interrogates the gentrification of Cornwall as Mark Jenkin’s 2019 Bait. Jenkin leaned in towards folk horror while Daly upends the romcom genre to tell her tale. And both have a place.
BFI Flare runs from 18-29 March.
