Four Letters of Love: a heartfelt but generic Irish romance

The transition from bestselling novel to film adaptation can take many paths, but there are essentially two approaches: stay faithful to the source text or rearticulate a novel’s essence cinematically. In Four Letters of Love, the literary mechanics are embedded in the film’s foundations. Perhaps this is to be expected given that Niall Williams, the author, also serves as screenwriter. In structure and style, the literary signalling here is intentional yet, in the end, limiting. 

Through flashback and mournful voiceover, Nicholas (Fionn O’Shea) reminisces about his 1970s Dublin adolescence. His father William (Pierce Brosnan), a buttoned-up civil servant, experiences a moment of divine inspiration: a shaft of light enigmatically falling across his desk. Inspired by this “sign”, William strides out of the office, heading home to tell his wife and son that he is off to the West of Ireland to become a painter. 

Nicholas then introduces the lively and wilful Isabel (Ann Skelly), whose blissful family life on an island off the west coast is imploded by another fateful moment. These instances of ‘divine’ intervention set in motion two coming-of-age journeys, intercut through the first half of the film, which eventually come together. The emotional fallout of his mother’s abandonment and William’s ill-fated return to the family plunges Nicholas into further soul-searching regarding his father’s artistic motivations and his own life path. 

Isabel leaves her parents (Gabriel Byrne and Helena Bonham Carter) to attend a nun-policed boarding school. Her free spirit immediately seeks escape, aided by local charmer Peader (Ferdia Walsh-Peelo), whom she marries in an attempt to define her life. But when Nicholas follows his father out west, the protagonists are drawn closer together. 

Four Letters of Love is heartfelt and sincere, and Polly Steele, whose Let Me Go (2017) was another tale of familial loss and trauma, directs with broad-brush efficiency. The West of Ireland is generically rendered in sweeping coastal drone shots, while orchestral strains heighten the melodramatic ebb and flow in a manner that feels more televisual than cinematic. Elements of magical realism support the narrative but remain functional rather than formally mysterious or visually evocative. 

All of this is elevated by the performances, particularly Bonham Carter’s Margaret, by turns caustically witty, disarmingly wise and morally ambiguous. But the cynic may baulk at the syrupy allusions to love as destiny and the rather tidy denouement.

► Four Letters of Love is in UK cinemas 18 July.