One Christmas Eve between the Good Friday Agreement and the smartphone, Gerry drinks alone while Stella attends midnight mass. Years earlier, an I.R.A. bomb blasted Gerry’s architectural career to “strictly third division”; Stella was shot while in late pregnancy, making a deal with God. “That vow, that pledge, that bargain; there is a debt to be paid,” she says, Like, one imagines, last Christmas, Gerry escapes and Stella searches. His anger and her religiosity drive the events of “Midwinter Break” (Shoebox Films/Film 4), showing now at the Montrose Playhouse.
As “Once in Royal David’s City” plays on the radio the following morning, the filmmakers orient us at high-speed: to the decade, to the unconcerned grown-up child—Stella can only leave an answerphone message on this, her first Christmas as a grandmother—and to Gerry’s poisonous cynicism towards Stella’s devout Catholicism. But just before we get there, the significance of the smartest scene in the whole film is almost missed. Stella returns after midnight to find Gerry passed out. She opens the fridge, removes a square china plate with eight sandwiches of different fillings, sits at the kitchen table, pulls the cling film back, sighs, jerks his wine bottle away, pauses to examine the options, and makes a selection. Before mass, she had prepared supper for two but only one was grateful enough to turn up.
“What is your life?” the priest says in his homily. “You are a mist that appears for a little while and then vanishes.” Stella believes that the retired couple “seem to have become exiled from each other” and pays for a spur-of-the-moment trip. “It’s a little something for both of us,” she says. “Amsterdam!” Gerry says, after opening the envelope containing the tickets. “That’s fantastic.” “Start the year with a bang.” On the airplane, Stella sits by the window and Gerry in the middle seat, about half-way back. He offers her a sweet. She passes him a wristband. “Stop you being sick,” she says. “Better off say a prayer,” he says. “Please God don’t make me vomit on this flight.”
By now, the audience grasps that Stella might find this blasphemous. The director draws her deepening devotion—best clothes for mass, prominent gold crucifix, sign of the cross pressed onto her forehead with holy water when entering church, detailed knowledge of the miracle of the indestructible host. We are not surprised when she drags Gerry to a little-known sisterhood of unmarried Catholics for some reason of her own.
The audience is also aware that Gerry considers his destructive sarcasm to be an asset. A crucial scene takes place in the hotel guest room on the first evening. Stella kneels by the bed in prayer. Gerry bursts from the bathroom, interrupts and asks Stella where his statins might be. No response. His intrusion on her ritual is not accidental. His smart-aleck one-liners—calling the miracle “minor league,” say—don’t come from a place of respect or love. “Every time I open my glasses case these days,” he says, “I’m pleasantly surprised to find my glasses. That’s a miracle.” But the audience senses that she misjudges the relationship too. One night before they go to sleep, Stella opens a conversation about life after death. He believes that everything will stop. “What would be the point?” she says. His answer is still going round and round in her head at lunch the the next day—“What if we’ve cut the cloth of our lives all wrong?” Stella proposes that there might be room at the religious order for “women like me who want to live a more religious life.” Gerry doesn’t give her any slack, replying too quickly. “There’s someone in there with all the answers, is there?” “These are questions you have to answer for yourself, Gerry.” But Gerry decides when conversations are terminated. “We should order,” he says. “I’m famished.”
The hotel restaurant has one of those breakfast tables with starched-white table linen, just-so milk jug, white-china cups and saucers, and a topped-up buffet table which offers seven types of milk. The cinematography is gorgeous. Their two-person table is set underneath a polished window of eight panes, curtains held open by tassels, soundscape so quiet inside that now and then trams and church bells can be caught outside. The camera stands still so that we can take it in; we can imagine that it would be a pleasure to linger over breakfast there, on that table, with someone we care about. As they admire the city’s old cultural treasures, their hearts open. The filmmakers capture the fundamental difference between seeing something and experiencing it. But at lunch—another perfect table setting—things fall back to where they were. “Come on Stella,” he says, “don’t take things so seriously.” “Why is anything spiritual so impossible for you to grasp?” she asks. She leaves. He heads to the nearest barroom, slamming the Troubles—to the much younger Irish barman—as “the end of human decency in the name of a religion.”
Lesley Manville, as Stella, is invariably well put together; she designs her face and coifs her hair to face the outside world; she is trim, and looks like the kind of long-distance walker we see on and off around Montrose. Ciarán Hinds, as Gerry, is hearty and paunchy; his hair and face lie every which way; his ankles are swollen; he struggles to remove his pullover and sit up from a lying position. Fact-checking, playing devil’s advocate, and debating are not subsets of love. “Midwinter Break” shows how these lead to bad relationships. “I have to be allowed my truth,” Gerry says, to which the audience might reply, Why? The “jokes and the poking fun and the derision and scorn” are a deadly toxin to Stella.
The gulls caw and the church bells chime and Stella is drawn back to that community dubbed by Gerry “the vomiting miracle place.” “Do you want me to go with you?” he asks. “No, thank you,” she says.
Adam Poole
23rd March 2026
If you are interested in viewing this screening, please book your tickets here
