This film is aimed at a very specific niche of Tove Jansson fandom – it’s for an elite tier who aren’t interested in her as creator of those lovable moppets, The Moomins, but as an author of soft-edged, new-agey autofiction. It sees young Sophie (Emily Matthews) and her introverted, work-addled father (Anders Danielsen Lie) heading to the Finnish coastal summerhouse of “Grandma” (Glenn Close) to work through the grief they are experiencing following the death of her mother/his wife. The lady of the house is a wrinkled, wise old puffin who acts as a guide for her son and granddaughter’s state of emotional confusion, parcelling out fortune cookie truth bombs about the healing power of nature and finding positivity among all the gloom.
And that’s pretty much the size of it, a “hang out” movie in many ways, as the narrative comprises a series of miniature escapades and episodes that is directly reflective of the book’s bifurcated structure. Soporific, uninvolving and generally just undernourishing, the film leans heavy on the blushing rural landscape without ever giving much sense of an original reason for it to exist. We know or understand so little about the characters and the poetic pithiness of the book itself feels fumbled. The punishing runtime is infuriatingly light on incident, consisting mostly of shots of the lapping sea or pretty clouds, all enveloped in mournful music. Even the usually great Danielsen Lie doesn’t get a look in, though there’s perhaps a tender charm to Close’s worldly matriarch. It’s certainly a work that requires a low tolerance for excitement, as the story doesn’t end so much as it enters into a predictable slow fade.