The Ballad of Wallis Island: A folk duo is reunited by an obsessive fan in this bittersweet British comedy

Like a jauntier Inside Llewyn Davis (2013), The Ballad of Wallis Island is an affecting comedy that contemplates the pains and pleasures of a musical career in freefall. And as it happens, like the Coen brothers’ film, it stars Carey Mulligan as a woman who represents the protagonist’s romantic failure.

Tom Basden is McGwyer, an arrogant, embittered musician racked with self-loathing over desperate celebrity behaviour, like teeth-whitening. He’s struggling to get his latest solo album financed and so grudgingly agrees to play a private gig for half a million pounds on a secluded island (fictional – filming took place in Wales). His mildly stalkerish patron is enthusiastic bumbler Charles (the poet-comedian Tim Key), who sets the tone when he greets a sullen Herb off the boat and immediately gets him soaking wet. “Dame Judi Drenched,” Charles grins, in the first of what is to be a long line of enjoyably terrible jokes. Charles – whose money comes from winning the lottery – has also managed to lure Herb’s former bandmate and ex-lover Nell (Mulligan) for the beach gig, to Herb’s surprise and outrage. Why? Let’s just say, it ’s not simply because Charles digs the hits by their original folk duo, McGwyer Mortimer. There’s a graver impetus for this whole plan than mere fandom, which successfully gives momentum to the film’s second half.

The short on which this is based, The One and Only Herb McGwyer Plays Wallis Island (2007), won an Edinburgh Film Festival award back in 2008. Seventeen years later, the long-form version involves many of the same team: director James Griffiths, plus Key and Basden on writing and acting duty. Other things have made it through too: a joke about the dripping tap in Herb’s room; payment for the gig delivered as cash in a suitcase, like a mobster’s backhander, and the same pleasing final twist.

The most notable addition to the feature is women. Charles is now haunted by the spectre of his late wife, and his ever-present yearning for her softens the edges of Key’s abrasive brand of humour, which, stretched across 90 minutes of screentime, might otherwise grate. As it is, Charles’s conversation is so needy and relentless that just occasionally it feels like we’re veering off into Misery territory.

The longing for a woman he can’t have is echoed in Herb with the arrival of Nell, with her ebullient husband (Akemnji Ndifornyen) in tow. Mulligan’s charisma lends real weight to Nell’s conflicted nostalgia for her and Herb’s past, despite the brevity of their shared scenes. “It was great,” she tells Herb as they strum guitars and sing in a conservatory at Charles’s country mansion. “It was, but it ’s gone now. It ’s time to grow up.” The fact of Mulligan’s celebrity helps the audience to see Nell the way Herb sees her – a grander, greater thing than him, doing this sad, silly gig in this crumbling house, desperate for cash. Cinematographer G. Magni Ágústsson shoots her the same way he shoots the barren but beautiful landscape: wild and magnificent, if never quite the main act.

The viewer longs, ill-advisedly, as Herb does, for the pair to unite. Their duets work wonderfully on wistful acoustic tracks like ‘Raspberry Fair’, recalling the emotional resonance of Johnny Flynn & The Sussex Wit. Mulligan’s rich, grounded tones underpin Basden’s more melancholy quality both on and off the guitar. Thanks to the years it has taken to get here, the film feels like a musical time capsule, capturing the folk resurgence of the noughties – which included Mumford & Sons, whose lead singer, Marcus Mumford, is Mulligan’s real-life husband.

The original short felt quite plotty; by contrast, the feature-length version sometimes feels sparse. Repeated gags about making phone-calls with bags of small change feel like padding. But for the most part this film works, because of an engaging hopefulness, a feeling that adult dislocation can be healed by human connection. Slowly, the purity of Charles’s devotion chips away at Herb’s chippiness. Imagine the bittersweet buddy comedy of Jesse Eisenberg’s recent award-winner A Real Pain (2024) plonked into the musicality of the Irish musical romance Once (2007).

The Ballad of Wallis Island is in the end not about departing women, but about how the men left behind build each other back up. They are the main act; their mutual respect (if not quite friendship) is the film’s central duet. This is simple but not simplistic filmmaking; an exceedingly British comedy that steers just clear of mawkish.

► The Ballad of Wallis Island is in UK cinemas now.