Wholesome young stars – and Vanessa Redgrave – do their best with this anodyne Irish-set love story
Although the main characters in this romantic tale are meant to be just over 18, this Sky Movies release is manifestly aimed at a much younger market with its sex-free storyline and nice-girls-finish-first morality. Sure, the plot is as corny as Cracker Jack, revolving as it does around wholesome blond normcore kid Finley (Rose Reid), an aspiring violinist, who arrives in rural
Ireland from
New York to do a semester abroad and falls in love with non-threateningly baby-faced movie star Beckett (Jedidiah Goodacre).
But the film-makers have taken pains to gussy it up with a few contemporary details. For example, Beckett (who, like all the
American characters, inexplicably has a last name for a first name) is in Ireland to work on a Game of Thrones-style fantasy movie series. Meanwhile Finley, compelled by her
Irish Studies teacher to mingle with a local elder, reads the Twilight novels to her assigned crotchety old biddy Cathleen (Vanessa Redgrave, no less). Both references thus allow the film to namecheck other romantic texts that this demographic loves – and sort of laugh at them at the same time.