The Secret of Roan Inish is a 1994 independent fantasy adventure film written and directed by John Sayles. It is based on the 1957 novel Secret of the Ron Mor Skerry, by Rosalie K. Fry. The film draws upon Irish and Orcadian folklore about selkies—seals that can shed their skins to become human. The film's story takes place in the province of Ulster in northwest Ireland and follows Fiona, a young girl who is sent to live with her grandparents and her cousin Eamon near the island of Roan Inish, where the selkies are rumored to live. After discovering that Fiona's lost baby brother is living among the seals, Fiona and Eamon try to bring him back to their family.
Contents
Plot
In 1946, a young girl named Fiona is sent to live with her grandparents in an Irish fishing village, due to the death of her mother, the illness of her father, and her own frail health. Her grandfather tells her about their family's history, including their evacuation from their home on the tiny island of Roan Inish during the Second World War. In the Irish language, the island is known as Rón Inis, meaning "Island of Seals". Fiona's cousin Tadhg tells her about their ancestor who married a beautiful selkie (seal-woman). Although the marriage was happy, the selkie retained her seal-bond to the ocean, and the selkie's blood remains in their family.
Fiona begins accompanying her cousin Eamon on errands to Roan Inish. She sees a young boy she believes is her brother Jamie, who was lost to the sea several years earlier. She observes that the seals seem to feed and care for him. When she calls out to him, he runs away and climbs into a wooden cradle which serves as a boat, then disappears into the sea. Eamon warns Fiona not to tell her grandparents about the boy.
Fiona and Eamon decide to entice their grandparents to move back to Roan Inish, hoping that when they do, the seals will return Jamie to them. Their grandparents do not wish to return due to the sadness they feel at losing Jamie. To coax them to move, Fiona and Eamon begin restoring long-abandoned cottages on the island.
While in the company of her grandparents, Fiona worries aloud about Jamie's safety during a storm. Although shocked at the possibility that Jamie still lives, Fiona's grandmother decides to mount a rescue mission. When Fiona, Eamon and their grandparents arrive on Roan Inish, they see no sign of Jamie inside the cottages. Then, Jamie's cradle-boat arrives onshore and he heads for one of the cottages to escape the storm. When he sees his family, he runs back to his boat, but the seals herd him towards his family. He reluctantly makes his way into his grandmother's arms, and the family takes shelter from the storm.
Production
In creating the film, John Sayles drew on original research of Celtic island lore and language, including the Blasket memoirs, a series of vernacular memoirs collected in the 1920s and '30s from residents of the Great Blasket, an island off the County Kerry coast evacuated by the Irish government in 1953 and made a national park in 1989.
"Veteran cinematographer Haskell Wexler gives The Secret of Roan Inish an effortlessly elemental look. Without ostentation or self-consciousness, the film immerses you in the spume, fog and glare of the seaside life, with its temporal mysteries and its organic metamorphoses. Mason Daring's spare, traditional Irish score adds one more layer of melancholy atmosphere," noted Scott Rosenberg of SFGate. Although in the original novel the story takes place in Scotland, the filmmakers decided to have the film take place in Ireland for practical reasons. According to John Sayles in the director's commentary, most of the film was shot in County Donegal in Ulster in the north of Ireland, with some scenes being filmed on the Isle of Mull in Argyll, Scotland.
Over 1,000 girls were tested for the role of Fiona, which required the actress to be "Thin, underweight, pale complexion, but perky and not afraid of water."
Restoration
In 2020, the UCLA Film and Television Archive made a digitally restored print of the film.
Reception
Critical response
It holds a 96% average rating of 7.8/10 on review site Rotten Tomatoes, based on 45 reviews. Scott Rosenberg of SFGate describes it as being "a lot like the island it's named after: It seems to occupy a time of its own, cut off from the speed and overload of contemporary life and drifting to its own ancient rhythms." Metacritic, which uses a weighted average, assigned the film a score of 80 out of 100, based on 21 critics, indicating "generally favorable" reviews. Critic Stephen Holden, film critic for The New York Times, liked the film's direction. He wrote, "The Secret of Roan Inish is the first film directed by Mr. Sayles that could be described as visually rhapsodic. Photographed by Haskell Wexler on Ireland's rugged northwestern seacoast, it is a cinematic tone poem in which man and nature, myth and reality flow together in a way that makes them ultimately indivisible."