Learning to Breathe Under Water Review: Rory Kinnear Shines in an Uneven Serio-Comedy About a Bereaved Father and Son

In 1986, a fiberglass sculpture of a shark plunging headfirst into the roof of an ordinary-looking row house in the English town of Headington appeared as if out of nowhere. According to the artist who made it, John Buckley, and the owner of the home pierced by the shark, Bill Heine, the work was meant as a protest against the recent bombing of Libya, nuclear power and nuclear war, among other things.

However, art has a funny way of multiplying meanings, often above and beyond what its creators intended, and the Headington Shark is a case in point. The filmmakers behind comedy-drama Learning to Breathe Under Water, which recently premiered in Karlovy Vary (and also played the Galway Film Fleadh very near where the film was shot), jump the shark concept across the Irish Sea to make a different sort of point, perhaps about the absurdity of death.

This uneven, more-than-a-little-sappy but ultimately well-meaning assemblage posits a bereaved artist (Rory Kinnear) who constructs a metal apex predator on his roof after the death of his wife, right through the bedroom ceiling of his young son Leo (Ezra Carlisle). A Bulgarian au pair played by Maria Bakalova (Borat Subsequent Moviefilm, The Apprentice) joins this odd domestic menage in order to move the story along toward mild change and finally closure.

There’s something that’s not quite working here, but it isn’t easy to tell if the problem lies in Richard Brabin’s script or Rebekah Fortune’s direction, which feel like they’re pulling in opposite directions. The screenplay, Brabin’s first produced script, contains many amusing lines, often spoken by elementary-school-aged Leo, a serious little boy whose literal approach to the world and tendency to stim by touching his fingers together when stressed suggest an undiagnosed neurodivergent condition. When Bakalova’s Anya asks what he and his father like to eat, for instance, Kinnear’s Peter replies that they’ll eat anything. “But it has to be food,” Leo stipulates usefully.

Young Carlisle’s deadpan delivery really makes moments like this sing. Likewise, small snatches of stop-motion animated business, as if illustrating the weird and wonderful world inside Leo’s head, add a sense of whimsy, recalling the early work of Paddington director Paul King such as his similarly darkly comic Bunny and the Bull.

Unfortunately, the narrative here doesn’t keep up its forward momentum, the flights of fancy start to dry up, and the back half of the film descends into mawkishness, with an entirely manufactured conflict brewed up between Anya and Peter that sees Anya moving out and things falling apart. At this point, it feels like the fault may lay with Fortune’s command of tone, but another pass at the script surely wouldn’t have gone amiss.

What’s less arguable is the quality of Kinnear’s performance, a fine study in comic understatement at first that modulates into a delicately limned portrait of pain barely stifled. A scene in which he plays the piano that belonged to his late wife and silently starts crying is a proper heartbreaker, and a further reminder that Kinnear is criminally underused in both British and Irish cinema. Mind you, he’s consistently employed to play stiff or oddball supporting characters (see, for instance, his British officer in TV’s Say Nothing) or, in the case of horror feature Men, all the stiff and oddball male characters that aren’t Jessie Buckley, but this film proves he can carry a lead role effortlessly.

Given that most of the action happens inside Leo and Peter’s home, special attention is lavished on the production design, overseen by May Davies, which adeptly uses color and set dressing to illustrate where Peter’s head is at in any given scene. The clutter ebbs and flows like the tide, reflecting the chaos of spaces where artists live, often homes just on the cusp between quaint and unbearably chaotic.