The Secret of Roan Inish (1994)

Ireland in the 50s. Her father sends unhappy little Fiona (Jeni Courtney) to live with her grandparents in a small fishing village on the coast close-by to Roan Inish, a tiny island the family lived on in better times, before the death of Fiona’s mother, before “the Evacuation” (the film never explains the why and wherefore of that), and before the somewhat bizarre death of Fiona’s little brother Jamie on the day of said Evacuation.

Fiona is fascinated by the tales her family and others tell her of her family’s past on Roan Inish, of their supposed familial connection to selkies, and the death of her brother. Fiona herself encounters things that very much fit into a supernatural reading of the world, suggesting the idea that her little brother didn’t die, but was taken because the family left the island. During the course of the film, she will realize that the family’s return to Roan Inish might be all it needs to get her brother back, restoring a way of life clearly bound to make everyone happier to boot.

The great John Sayles’s The Secret of Roan Inish does tell this story rather less dramatically than all of this may sound – this is a family-friendly picture and not folk horror, so the selkies’ activity, even when they do something pretty terrible like kidnap a baby, is treated more as a natural part of the world the characters live in than a source of horror. That’s not a criticism, mind you, for part of what makes Secret of Roan Inish as charming and as interesting as it is, is exactly how willing it is to take on the worldview of its child protagonist, looking at the world – and here, a selkie is just as much part of the natural world as is a fish - with wonder rather than terror. Fiona, we are told, is not a child to frighten easily, after all.

Typical for Sayles, quite a bit of the film’s running time is taken up by flashbacks to (or should that be called enactments of?) the various stories about her family and their past Fiona is told. In a Sayles film, identity, and understanding of the past and what we call home and community, is often constructed out of the bits and pieces of stories, people becoming what they are not just through experience but through the way others in their community share their own experiences with them. Of course, Sayles is too intelligent a writer to not understand the vagaries of reconstructing Truth out of Memory but he also realizes that there’s a difference between historical and personal truth, and the truths Fiona discovers are all personal even if they are based on tales of her family history.

Because the film is slow, and quiet, and consciously unspectacular – none of which is meant in any way as a criticism of the film, for this is indeed the way this particular story needs to be told – the director has time and space enough to let the places Fiona inhabits breathe, suggesting a slower tempo, a greater closeness to natural rhythms of life. This, as well as how the film frames the family’s return to their traditional way of life as something equivocally good, could easily turn into a bit of back to nature kitsch (the only kitsch in this one is part of the sometimes really kitsch-Irish score) but Sayles never frames the story that way. This is not a film preaching universal closeness to nature and the past (and selkies) but one about the closeness to nature and the past of this specific group of people, in this specific place and time (this being a Sayles film, specificity when it comes to social and economic structures and pressures is a given anyway, even though this isn’t a film that’s about these things). It’s a rather refreshing approach when looked at in 2019.


Not only the film’s writing is sharp and involving in a quiet unassuming way, though. The film’s visual side (with cinematography by Haskell Wexler) has a calm and unfussy sense of beauty, never going for a postcard view of the Irish coast but seeming to accept the beauty and magic quite matter of factly together with those bits and pieces of the world that aren’t beautiful and magical. The same approach is used when it comes to the depiction of the fantastic aspects of the movie – magic here is just another part of nature, seen and treated with the same eye, yet still evoking a sense of awe and wonder.