Four Letters of Love, starring Pierce Brosnan and Helena Bonham Carter, is a saccharine tale of love and fate

Australia Broadcast Center

23-07-2025

If the romance genre lives and dies on chemistry, can you make a compelling film about lovers before they even meet?
Fast Facts about Four Letters of Love
What: A magical realism romance about two would-be lovers in 1970s Ireland
Starring: Fionn O'Shea, Ann Skelly, Pierce Brosnan, Helena Bonham Carter
Directed by: Polly Steele
Where: In cinemas now
Likely to make you feel: Unenchanted
In 1993, Nora Ephron decisively answered this question with Sleepless in Seattle, which played coy as to whether Meg Ryan and Tom Hanks's characters would even meet until its final scene — but spent its preceding 90 minutes articulating the dreams and desires of its incomplete, but perfectly interlocking halves.
Il Mare and its American remake, The Lake House, separated its characters not by distance but by years, building its epistolary romance around a time-twisting mailbox.
Four Letters of Love, an adaptation of Niall Williams's novel of the same name, is a magical realist tale of far-flung lovers in 1970s Ireland whose lives coalesce around the mystical, intertwining forces of coincidence, tragedy, and divine intervention.
Two earth-shattering events set the parallel plots in motion. William (Pierce Brosnan), a civil servant, is seemingly sent a divine order to leave his job and family to pursue an artist's life, leaving his frail wife (Imelda May) in the care of his son Nicholas (Fionn O'Shea, Dating Amber). Meanwhile, on a windy isle off Ireland's west coast, a gifted musician, Sean (Dónal Finn), suffers a paralysing fall.
Sometime later, Sean's sister Isabel (Ann Skelly, The Sandman) sets off for the mainland to complete her education at a convent school, while Nicholas traces the steps of his wayward father in the wake of a tragedy.
As he heads west, he briefly crosses paths with Isabel on a bus — but still, they remain strangers, and continue to go their separate ways.
For all his recklessness, William has been gifted with formidable creative drive, which unlocks his son's own talent for poetry when they reunite. Yet Nicholas remains a bystander in his own story, forced to contend with arbitrary tragedies rather than exercise his own volition.
William's search for artistic fulfilment more intuitively aligns with Isabel's rebellious streak, which drives her to neglect her education in favour of chasing after Peader (Ferdia Walsh-Peelo), a roguish older boy.
Armed with a crooked smile (and, more importantly, a car), Peader initially presents as a throwaway fling to stave off the boredom of convent school life. But when Isabel is kicked out of school, Peader unexpectedly ends up offering a home as well as paid work at his family's store.
Four Letters of Love is not so much a love story as it is a melodrama of fate, and a lousy one at that. There are only so many deaths, miracles, and declarations of love you can throw into a film before it feels like you're gorging on treacle.
Still, there's potential for compelling drama amid such chaos; for every incredulous plot contrivance that's explicitly handwaved as an act of God, it remains to be seen whether Nicholas and Isabel have the courage to follow their own hearts when their paths finally collide — especially when other romantic prospects stand in the way.
There's no irony in Williams's laughably sensational (sometimes borderline offensive) twists, nor is there any intensity of emotion.
Even its cast of veteran actors, which extends to Helena Bonham Carter and Gabriel Byrne as Isabel's parents, can only add so much respectability.
The film's best scenes hinge upon the relationship between Isabel and her mother Margaret, who gently attempts to coax her daughter out of her misguided life choices, even if Bonham Carter is straddled with a hokey screenplay ("Falling in love — well that's the easy part," she sighs at one point).
Squandered, too, is the expansive beauty of Ireland's west coast under Polly Steele's rote direction. Emerald seas and cascading sand dunes are drained by a colour palette of anaemic greys and browns, that tired visual hallmark of period cinema.
It may only take four letters to spell out love — but when it comes to this film, there's another word that strongly comes to mind.
Four Letters of Love is in cinemas now.