Allie (Jenny Whiffen), a freewheeling photographer, comes to visit her parents Sarah (Fiona Curzon) and John (George Little) at their cottage in the French countryside. John is losing his eyesight, which affects his drawings; Sarah looks on, poised somewhere between love, habit and duty. Allie's brother Richard (Andrew Loudon) lives nearby, with his French girlfriend and her young son. Later, Allie and Richard's sister Lucy (an excellent Eleanor Martin) turns up too. What should be a relaxed time of family get-togethers is, instead, painful and agonised.
It's the pain not of a stab wound but of broken skin, constantly being irritated, never getting a chance to heal. There's ominous tension between Allie and Richard: she seems jealous of his life, scornful of his choices, while he seems uncommonly touched by her. The father is a remote figure to them, and to us; he'd probably prefer it if the other characters and the movie's audience were all to go away and leave him alone to stare at the ravishing view.
As directed by Jonathan Hourigan, Almost Home stealthily captures the sense of a family of educated, capable people diverted into inarticulacy by perplexing thoughts. Communication, it seems, deserted this family long ago. As they brush against each other, there is so much being left unsaid that the feelings can surely reveal themselves only in outbursts and drastic action; and indeed, by the film's end, we've had both.
For all its dramatic material, the movie maintains a careful (though never sluggish) pacing. And there's so much here that is, or hints at, raw hurt, it's perhaps a relief that we're not asked to delve deeper. Atmospheric and classically composed, Almost Home remains alert to the conflicts that can exist between people whose lives are unavoidably entwined.
