One Of 2025's Best Films Is An Adaptation Of A Short Film From 2007

It's been a somewhat rough year at the movies so far. The box office is not doing well (as we've previously written about, it's tracking about 11% behind the box office at this same time last year), and several splashy movies have landed with a thud instead of a bang. Thankfully, though, a new bright spot has arrived in the form of a delightful indie movie called "The Ballad of Wallis Island" from Focus Features. This wasn't on our most anticipated movies of 2025 list, but I love when a smaller movie can sneak up and surprise me, and that's exactly what's happened here. 

The film tells the story of an eccentric man named Charles (Tim Key) who hires a down-on-his-luck musician named Herb McGwyer (Tom Basden) to travel out to Charles' remote island home to perform a gig. But when Herb arrives, he realizes that Charles has also invited Nell Mortimer (the always-great Carey Mulligan), Herb's former flame and former bandmate who he hasn't seen in years since their falling out and their band breaking up. There's some unresolved stuff between those two characters, so the movie is about whether they'll be able to reunite and play this gig or if their issues will prevent that from happening. Take a look at the trailer:

Interestingly, "The Ballad of Wallis Island" is a feature adaptation of a short film that came out eighteen years ago.

Structurally, the short film, "The One and Only Herb McGwyer Plays Wallis Island," is remarkably similar to the feature version. It's only 20 minutes long, but many of the story beats and even jokes and lines of dialogue are exactly the same, so it's a fascinating thing to watch the story be expanded and see a new character (Carey Mulligan's Nell) added to the narrative.

I recently sat down over Zoom with Tim Key and Tom Basden, who wrote and star in both versions of this story, and asked them about the journey of bringing this project to life all these years after the short. Tom Basden explained how the story expanded in the intervening years:

"When we made the short, the script was probably only about 10 or 12 pages, and then the short itself came out more like half an hour. I remember Tim and I sort of looking at each other and going, 'Huh, if we just did that a couple more times, we'd probably have a feature film' [...] It sowed the seeds for us, that like, 'OK, we really got something from those characters and really got quite a special dynamic there with that short, so we should definitely come back to that.' And then, quite cleverly [sarcastically], we didn't come back to it for the best part of about 15 years. 

Then in 2020, during lockdown — but I think we were sort of talking about it anyway — we revisited the notes that we'd made when we finished the short and were thinking about it as a feature, and we started writing the script and hit upon this idea of Herb having a former bandmate that he was in a relationship with that Charles also invites to try to reunite, to try to do something that's just a bit more manipulative than just organize a gig. Suddenly, the film opened up for us, I think. We suddenly realized it was an opportunity not just to tell a story of an artist and a fan who don't really get on, but of lost love and nostalgia and longing for things from the past and moving on. I think once we uncovered all of that, we were really excited by the scale that we felt the film could suddenly have."

The result is beautiful and funny and charming and sweet and melancholy, all swirling together to make up one of my favorite movies of 2025 so far. You can listen to my full interview with Basden and Key on today's episode of the /Film Daily podcast:

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"The Ballad of Wallis Island" is currently in select theaters and opens wide on April 18, 2025.