The Ballad of Wallis Island film review — Carey Mulligan and Tim Key bring soul to a melancholy farce

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Prepare for a shock in The Ballad of Wallis Island. The film is a British comedy low in budget and high in whimsy, a combination I for one have learned to dread. And yet the movie is a delight — just the right side of zany, perfectly askew.

The star and co-writer is absurdist comic actor Tim Key. (His highest-profile work until now has been playing Sidekick Simon opposite Steve Coogan’s Alan Partridge.) His character here, Charles, is prime Key: an English bumbler who just keeps talking whatever the context, an unplugged geyser of puns and clichés.

But fate has also smiled on him enough to make him a lottery winner, living in a rambling pile on a scrap of an island, somewhere off the UK mainland. And so to the staging of a private concert by his favourite musical artist, British neo-folk star Herb McGwyer (Tom Basden, Key’s co-writer). Sadly, the latter proves a sour egomaniac, his mood not improved by the arrival of Nell, his former musical and life partner, played by Carey Mulligan.

Casting Mulligan is a coup twice over. Her involvement almost certainly got the film greenlit. But her presence pays off on screen too: star power cranked, to lighten up Herb’s brooding gloom.

It isn’t the first time Mulligan has been half of a him-and-her folk duo. Back in 2013, she played that role too in the Coen brothers’ chilly Inside Llewyn Davis. The Ballad of Wallis Island is a sweeter proposition that dates back further still. Key and Basden first released a version of the story as a short film in 2007. The 18-year pause feels very on brand.

The problem with making any short a feature — even on a brisker timescale — can be sustaining the idea over serious screen time. But Key and Basden have retrofitted their movie with real dramatic stakes, which you might not see coming given Key’s befuddled shtick. That sense of surprise feels of a piece with the whole film. The wordplay is fun. What you also don’t anticipate is how poignant it all gets — a melancholy farce with an oddly pure soul.

★★★★☆

In UK cinemas from May 30