After playing with our expectations, this turns out to be a very different sort of film.

The acting is good, and the firecracker script has some excellent ideas.

Although I seem to have had higher expectations than I thought, the movie is super entertaining.

The story, direction, characters, and writing/dialogue is akin to taking a tranquilizer shot to the neck, but everything else was so well done.

A woman (Lotte Verbeek) has suffered some sort of loss. She's playing with her ring. Strangers are grabbing her belongings left outside her apartment. She goes hitching into the Irish countryside. She stops at a farm where Martin (Stephen Rea) offers food for work. They collect seaweed from the coast to fertilize the land. She refuses to give him any personal information including her name. They find solace in each other's damaged lives.These two damaged characters are played by compelling big-time actors. It's a quiet movie filmed by first-time Polish-Dutch director Urszula Antoniak. It's all about the quiet which sometimes generates powerful moments. Mostly, it's just quiet. It's an interesting debut.

With additional dialogue the entire complexion of the film would have changed. And as a matter of fact, from a couple of critic reviews, I had gone in thinking there was to be much less than there actually was. The natural sounds become much more noticeable and meaningful, and are a plus for enjoyment. Rea is one of today's great actors, and one of the few very recognizable names that when you see him on screen, he takes over his character and you then see less of 'him.' Verbeek was 27 at the time, having just graduated from theater-school a year earlier. She is remarkable and I'll seriously look forward to seeing her once again... same for the writer-director. It's a small, simple little little film, but you'll find yourself think about it long after viewing it... and it will never age.

Belying its' title, 'Nothing Personal' is clearly a very personal film. Set on the west coast of Ireland, this two-hander explores the decision to leave virtually everything behind and offers a study of loneliness and reconnection through a gradual re-building of trust. With strong performances from both leads, I was increasingly absorbed as their characters unfolded, and the film is at its' best in the gentle humour and the slowly developing relationship between them; there are some lovely touches and moments, like stopping the wind blowing through the grass.Unfortunately this undoubted emotional engagement seems to have come at the expense of narrative coherence. Whilst I don't expect everything handed to me on a plate, it felt quite an uphill struggle trying to follow the Director's clues about what was actually happening. I couldn't quite work out if the chronology was chopped up or not, and I felt the main device of leaving history unspoken between the pair was unnecessarily allowed to overwhelm plot lucidity at times, leaving me with too many unanswered questions for it to be a consistently rewarding experience; I look forward to reading the future IMDb message board musings of more perceptive viewers. I suspect the film will be compared to Ondine – similar location and 'strong, mysterious, beautiful foreigner' theme –and whilst undoubtedly more cerebral and emotionally resonant, it's a shame that its' increasing tendency to veer into a somewhat perplexing swamp rather lets it down.If you have a penchant for 'hands swirling round in seaweed' close-ups, then this is certainly the film for you – otherwise, despite its' spirit and intrigue, the level of confusion means that for me, it won't stay in the memory for too long.

A very promising cinema debut. Though most of it is set on the Irish West coast, the whole film has an Eastern European feel to it: sparse dialog, little music, beautiful still shots of landscape and interiors and relentlessly grim weather. I don't find the choice of location at all artificial. If you want to get away from one of the most densely populated countries in the world on a budget, the West of Ireland doesn't seem such a bad choice.This is a film not so much about loneliness, but about being alone. While the female lead clearly had a very negative experience before the story begins (loss of a loved one or traumatic end of a relationship?), one senses that her being alone in this remote corner of Europe is something she deliberately chose and eventually prefers. It seems male viewers have problems with her arrogance and rudeness, while women (including yours truly) find her strong and full of character. Stephen Rea provides a perfect match for her impulsive behaviour and injects a gentle sense of humour. Fortunately their developing 'relationship' avoids romantic clichés.I like films that leave you guessing about the characters' inner thoughts, motives and actions. Combined with the powerful imagery, it makes this one linger in the mind long after the house lights have switched on. Although I found the last scene puzzling and out of place and while the storyline might have been tightened up here and there, I am certainly keen to see what Urszula Antoniak comes up with in her next project.