Light in story but heavy in mood, McDowell’s film allows the beautiful Finnish landscape to speak for itself in an evocative drama that finds life in death and death in life. Sophia (newcomer Emily Matthews) is already collecting seaweed by the seaside when her father (Anders Danielsen Lie) and grandmother (Glenn Close) first step inside the place where they’ll celebrate Midsummer. Sophia and her grandmother’s experience of the island is reciprocal in their education: when the latter forgets the feeling of sleeping in a tent, Sophia spends the night outdoors to relay the sights, the sounds, the smells — replenishing the memory that her grandmother had lost.