Review by okpilak

We meet Mary, who lives with her mother Molly in a small town in 1840's England. Mary has a reputation as a superb fossil hunter and discoverer. But as a woman in a male dominated field, it counts for little, and her life is one of meager existence, scouring the beaches for fossils that may be washed up by the tides, or washed down from the hill side, selling small fossils to any tourists who come by the small town. Ammonite refers to a fossil creature. Her mother had ten children, most of whom died, and each death took something out of her. One day, along comes a man of means, and wants to learn from Mary, and will pay for the privilege. He has his wife Charlotte along, who is in poor health, and needs the sea air to recover. Married probably not for love, she does not want to recover. Her husband, off again to something else, offers to pay Mary to tend to his wife. At first she resists, but she needs the money, and after Charlotte gets very ill, Mary starts to care for her. And Charlotte gets better and better. They develop a relationship, but being from two different worlds, Charlotte does not understand where Mary is coming from. The movie is very slow paced, but the level of emotions packed in is very high, and one wonders if somehow both of them can benefit. In a scene where a man is offering to buy a fairly large specimen they found, and Mary painstakingly uncovered, Charlotte steps in letting the man know the price he was offering was much to low for the work involved. That shows the huge gap that exists between their two worlds. If one wants to watch a movie about the emotional level developing between two people, this movie is very satisfying.