Last Updated on February 21, 2026 by Monica Castillo
Midwinter Break is rated PG-13 by the MPA for thematic material involving alcoholism, some strong language, bloody images, and suggestive material. This is a quiet, adult film whose impact comes less from what it shows than from what it sits with. Still, there are elements parents should know about.
I kept thinking about my parents in hotel rooms. How, after decades together, a trip that’s supposed to feel like a gift can start to feel like a test. You notice who takes the bed nearest the bathroom. Who controls the thermostat. Who remembers why you came in the first place. Watching Midwinter Break, that low-grade anxiety the sense that something long settled might quietly come undone hovers in the air long before the film ever admits it has anything on its mind.
In the first 20 minute the movie feels like something I want to root for. A small, adult drama adapted from Bernard MacLaverty’s novel, co-written by the author himself with Nick Payne. No brand recognition. No winks. Just two people, a marriage, and time pressing down on them. You could make a persuasive argument that cinema needs more of this kind of thing, and fewer loud distractions designed to evaporate before you reach the parking lot. Then you watch the film, and you realize that good intentions don’t always survive the trip from the page to the screen.
The couple at the center are Stella and Gerry, played by Lesley Manville and Ciarán Hinds. They’ve been married for decades, long enough that the marriage no longer announces itself. It just exists, like furniture. They left Belfast during the Troubles after something violent happened to Stella while she was pregnant details the film parcels out in flashbacks that keep widening but never quite deepen. They settled in Glasgow. Life happened. Now they’re old enough to have routines instead of dreams.
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Early on, the movie gets this part right. Manville and Hinds have the unforced ease of people who’ve learned each other’s rhythms by heart. Stella goes to church. Gerry drinks more than he should and less than he thinks. They needle each other gently. There’s affection there, even if the word “romance” feels like something they stopped using years ago. Nothing seems broken. Just worn.
So when Stella surprises Gerry with a Christmas trip to Amsterdam, it lands as a plausible, even sweet gesture. The scenes once they arrive have a quiet observational humor that feels earned. They comment on the size of the hotel room. They wander through familiar tourist spaces. Gerry, naturally, finds an Irish pub, because some habits survive border crossings intact. I smiled at that. I’ve seen that man. I’m probably related to him.
Amsterdam looks fine gray skies, reflective canals but director Polly Findlay shoots it as if she’s afraid the city might distract us from the dialogue. The camera rarely risks curiosity. Shots arrive exactly as expected, then leave. You start predicting the coverage, and that’s never a good sign. The film doesn’t need visual fireworks, but it does need a sense that someone is shaping images with intention rather than obligation. Too often, it feels staged, careful, polite. Like a play that forgot to transform itself into a movie.
Eventually, Stella reveals why she insisted on this trip, and this is where the film’s ambitions finally surface and where they start to slip. What she wants involves faith, a secret she’s carried for most of her adult life, and a dawning awareness that the marriage she’s been living inside no longer resembles the one she thought she was building. These are heavy ideas, the kind that should feel like they’ve been pressing against the inside of the film from the first frame. Instead, they arrive almost as talking points. The movie gestures toward decades of dissatisfaction without letting us feel its daily texture: the compromises, the silences, the small disappointments that harden into something unrecognizable. When the truth finally comes out, it doesn’t feel like a wound reopening. It feels like new information.
That problem becomes impossible to ignore during the storm-delayed airport confrontation, when Stella finally says everything she’s been holding back. The scene is controlled, even dignified, and both actors handle it with care. But it lands oddly flat. Not because the emotions are false, but because the groundwork hasn’t been laid. I found myself reacting the way Gerry does—caught off guard, scrambling to understand how we got here so fast. A reckoning like this needs accumulation. The film keeps skipping the accumulation.
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Manville and Hinds do what they can. They always do. Neither actor reaches for easy tears or grand gestures, and that discipline deserves respect. But even great actors need something solid to push against. Here, the script keeps stepping aside just when it should be leaning in. Their performances start to feel bigger than the film around them, which is a strange problem to have in a drama this intimate.
I don’t think Midwinter Break fails because it’s small or quiet. It falters because it confuses restraint with insight and caution with honesty. It wants to say something about how people drift apart without ever announcing it, about how love can survive long past understanding. Those ideas deserve sharper attention than this film gives them.
When it ended, I didn’t feel angry. Just tired. The way you do after a conversation that keeps circling something important without ever quite naming it. I kept thinking about that hotel room again, about two suitcases on opposite sides of the bed, and how sometimes the distance between them feels larger than an entire city.
Midwinter Break Parents Guide
Violence & Intensity: There’s no conventional violence in the present-day storyline, but the film carries emotional weight tied to past trauma. Flashbacks reference a violent incident during the Northern Ireland Troubles, including brief bloody imagery. Nothing is graphic or lingered over, but the implications are serious and may be upsetting, especially given the film’s somber tone and lack of emotional cushioning.
Language: Expect a handful of strong words, used in moments of frustration or emotional release rather than for shock value. No slurs, but the tone can turn cutting during arguments, particularly in later scenes.
Sexual Content / Nudity: There’s no explicit sexual activity or nudity. Some dialogue carries suggestive undertones tied to marriage, intimacy, and long-simmering resentment, but it’s all verbal and restrained. This is a film about emotional distance more than physical closeness.
Drugs, Alcohol & Smoking: One main character drinks heavily, and the film treats this as a long-standing problem rather than a background detail. Drinking is shown repeatedly and matter-of-factly, sometimes humorously at first, then more uncomfortably as the story progresses. No drug use is depicted. Smoking is minimal or absent.
Age Recommendations: Best suited for teens 15 and up, and honestly more likely to resonate with adults. The pacing is slow, the conflicts are internal, and the themes revolve around marriage, regret, faith, and emotional erosion over time. Younger viewers may find it uneventful or confusing, while older teens may grasp the content but not the emotional context it assumes.
Release date: April 9, 2026 (Netherlands)
