London Breeze Film Festival 2025: The Summer Book

Writer: Robert Jones

Director: Charlie McDowell

Lovers of Tove Jansson’s novel, The Summer Book, may fear that any attempt to film it will take away the magic. But they have no need to worry with this sensitive adaptation. Charlie McDowell uses a Finnish crew to direct with evident love for both the location and the book’s quietly meditative quality. Robert Jones’s script stays true to the structure and tone of the original, even if he strips out some of the scenes which might have added depth, such as the arrival of a child Sophia’s age which never blossoms into friendship. But better this than striving to add to the very slight plot. The fact that nothing much happens is all part of the story’s charm.

Artist Jansson, creator of the Moomins, based The Summer Book on her experience of summers spent with her grandmother on a tiny island in the Finnish archipelago. It’s an isolated place. There’s nothing much to do and the weather can be unpredictable. Sophia, the nine-year-old grandchild, occasionally moans about being bored. From time to time, her grandmother gently reveals the mysterious beauty of the place, teaching her to explore the mosses and carving little wooden boats. But what she also teaches Sophia is to sit still in nature.

Sophia’s mother has died. The fact is glimpsed at one remove by the overwhelming grief of her father, who throws himself into his illustration work and his gardening. Sophia seems to have no language to talk about grief, but it seeps out in sudden outbursts. “I don’t care about families,” she blurts out at one point. She’s convinced her father has stopped loving her since his wife died.

It’s her grandmother’s approach – loving but unsentimental – that gradually brings comfort. Glenn Close gives a mesmerising performance as the elderly woman. It seems miraculous to see a once-fabled beauty happy to be portrayed in such unvarnished detail. She potters about the shoreline in old tennis shoes, stooped with age, leaning heavily on a gnarled stick, her legs wide apart for balance. The camera lingers on her face, still beautiful though now lined with age.

We sense the grandmother’s calm awareness that death cannot be far off. But we also glimpse her continuing delight in life as she sits alone, savouring a cigarette, or, in one beautiful scene, lies down in a patch of woodland bathed in sunshine. Again Jansson’s lack of sentimentality is evident in the grandmother’s occasional moments of irritation. She’s a woman who savours solitude. Sometimes Sophia’s questions and demands are too much. “I don’t like it when you just lie there,” the child expostulates. “When are you going to die?” “Never you mind,” says the grandmother serenely, then after a beat: “soon.”

Sophia herself is played with astonishing fidelity by newcomer, Emily Matthews. Matthews has that gift of unselfconscious stillness and watchfulness which Catherine Clint showed as Cáit in The Quiet Girl. She never tries to charm – for the most part her face displays a range from truculence to quiet absorption. Even potentially sentimental moments are given rigour by Matthews’ performance. So when Sophia addresses God demanding something happen, then adding ‘I’ve changed my mind’ when a storm blows up, she conveys fear not cuteness.

Anders Danielsen Lie gives a thoughtful performance as the father, a part amplified from the original story in which he is at most a shadowy character.

Norwegian cinematographer Sturla Brandth Grørlen captures scenes of land and water without any showiness. There is no attempt to make the island look especially picturesque. It’s a bleak, stony place, at the mercy of winds. Sound design by Micke Nyström is similarly attentive to the truth – focusing on the quiet sounds of nature, to lapping water and the occasional cry of a bird. Music by Hania Rani is beautifully atmospheric, reminiscent of Michael Nyman’s score for The Piano.

In its simplicity and lack of plot, The Summer Book won’t be to everyone’s taste. But for Jansson’s many fans, it will be a delight.

The Summer Book is screening at the London Breeze Festival from 22-26 October.