Wendy Ide’s pick of other films: Time and Water, The Fall of Sir Douglas Weatherford, I Am Frankelda

Time and Water

(93 mins, PG) Directed by Sara Dosa; featuring Andri Snær Magnason

There’s a point in the spring, as the long Icelandic nights start to recede, when you can smell the glacier. Or so says Hulda, the grandmother of poet and author Andri Snær Magnason. This evocative image captures the rich sensory essence of this lyrical documentary about the interconnection of family history and landscape. Time and Water lacks the drama and passion of Sara Dosa’s previous film Fire of Love, her Oscar-nominated feature about the relationship between two vulcanologists. But it shares a similar sensitivity to human fascination with some of the most geologically violent places on the planet.

Based on Magnason’s 2019 book, On Time and Water, and narrated by the author himself, the film views Iceland’s shifting landscape through an intimate lens. The country is on the frontline of climate change. Glaciers are shrinking: Magnason is invited to write a memorial text to commemorate the first one officially declared “dead”. The author, whose grandparents fell in love on the country’s largest glacier, Vatnajökull, and spent their three-week honeymoon hiking and camping on the snow, has a personal connection to the glaciers and the layers of history caught in their ice tongues.

It’s a strikingly handsome picture: Dosa employs plenty of soaring drone photography of the Icelandic landscape, plus hauntingly beautiful abstract shots captured inside the ice-caves. All of this is threaded together with engaging home video footage and archival material, some of it taken by Magnason, some captured by his grandfather during his expeditions with the Icelandic Glaciological Society. It’s not just the land that is changing: Magnason reflects on the ways that language may be transformed to reflect the altered experience of island life. Will Iceland still be Iceland once the glaciers are gone?

The Fall of Sir Douglas Weatherford

(95 mins, 15) Directed by Sean Robert Dunn; starring Peter Mullan, Jakob Oftebro, Cameron Fulton

Widower Kenneth (Peter Mullan) has dedicated himself to raising the profile of his very distant relative, Sir Douglas Weatherford, an unjustly overlooked historical figure whose achievements spanned literature, philosophy and the gnarly fringes of medical science. Equipped with a wig, a frockcoat and an inexhaustible supply of biographical trivia, Kenneth corners unsuspecting tourists at the down-at-heel visitors centre in his small Scottish Highland village. Such is his enthusiasm for his subject, Kenneth is happy to overlook the more unsavoury aspects of Sir Douglas’s legacy: the village razing, the animal slaughtering, the botched human-to-goat brain transplant experiments. But when a fantasy television series location shoot arrives in town, disrupting the tranquillity of the community and attracting a new breed of visitor, Kenneth takes it as a personal affront.

This portrait of a cantankerous man coming undone is played for laughs — it’s narrated by the ghost of Sir Douglas and spiked with arch humour. But in fact, this is rather a poignant tale of male loneliness and disconnection. The plot is a little thin and meandering, but Mullan’s heartbreaking performance means it achieves a balance of absurdity and real pathos.

I Am Frankelda

(104 mins, 12) Directed by Arturo Ambriz, Roy Ambriz; voices Mireya Mendoza, Arturo Mercado Jr, Luis Leonardo Suárez

(Netflix)

Mexico’s first stop-motion animated feature film, the densely plotted gothic fantasy I Am Frankelda is a spin-off of a successful TV series. Produced with the support of Guillermo del Toro, the film,which launches on Netflix this week, may prove to be too impenetrable for audiences who are not already well versed in Frankelda’s world.

She is Francisca Imelda (voiced by Mireya Mendoza) an aspiring horror writer in 19th-century Mexico who, as a child, escaped her grief after her mother’s death by creating fantastical realms populated by nightmarish monsters. What she doesn’t realise is that whatever she writes, she conjures to life in an alternate world ruled over by Prince Herneval (Arturo Mercado Jr) and his parents.

The textured, roughly hewn look of the animated figures is distinctive – the film looks like the punky younger sister of Henry Selick’s The Nightmare Before Christmas. But it makes heavy weather of its convoluted storyline and may stretch the attention spans of younger viewers.

Photographs by Andri Snær Magnason/National Geographic, Organic Publicity, Netflix