I promise I’ll take a break from ‘90s movies after this month, but I couldn’t let March go by without featuring the ultimate classic of my childhood, the movie that explains the 10% of my personality not accounted for by Jane Eyre and Tudor history: 1994’s The Secret of Roan Inish.

Over the years I’ve tried to sell this movie to skeptical viewers with the following pitches:

Look, you’re either onboard now or you never will be. Let’s assume the former and proceed.

Here’s the situation: In 1946, Fiona Coneelly’s mother gets a nice headstone on a beautiful Irish island, leaving behind her small daughter; her husband; her older son, whose existence is barely acknowledged by the other characters throughout the movie; and an infant. Two or three years later, the islanders have all moved to the mainland. Fiona’s now about ten years old² and is living in a city with her dad and older brother. Crucially, no sign of the baby. Dad’s bartender suggests sending Fiona to the countryside to live with her grandparents, closer to their erstwhile island home, so she’s not constantly breathing in pollution and having to track down her sad father at the pub.

Fiona is completely silent in this scene while the adults talk at and about her, but because she’s played by one of the best child actors to ever be a one-hit wonder, we clearly see her vulnerability, her weariness, and her tentative hopefulness when her grandparents are mentioned.³

Next thing we know she’s on a boat heading to GrandparentsTown. She notices a seagull and a young seal (*SEAL ALERT*) watching her as she approaches her destination.

Her grandparents (Mick Lally⁴ and Eileen Colgan) are delighted to have her. Grandmother is a no-nonsense woman who loves a project—in this case, getting some meat on Fiona’s scrawny bones. Grandfather is a storyteller, welcoming a fresh audience for his family lore. The very first bedtime story out of the gate is a flashback to his great-grandfather’s formative nineteenth-century traumas:

Are you following this? It’s okay, Fiona’s not either. But she’s a good listener! That’s one of many admirable qualities she demonstrates throughout the movie, along with being game for anything, asking lots of questions, and giving other characters rapid-fire updates about her adventures in a “Keep up!!” tone. Because the adults grant her a baseline level of autonomy, she quickly blossoms from the quiet, drained kid we saw in the opening scenes into an intrepid mover and shaker. She’s constantly either learning new stuff or drawing on stuff she’s already learned, from how to tie various kinds of knots to how to (spoiler alert) repatriate her baby brother from a bunch of seals. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

Grandfather and Grandmother have also taken in Fiona’s friendly teenage cousin Eamon, who helps Grandfather earn his livelihood as a fisherman. Eamon tells Fiona that on clear nights, she might see a mysterious light originating on Roan Inish, the abandoned island that used to be her family’s home.

Sidenote: Why is the island abandoned? When Fiona asks, she’s told that her father’s generation got restless and wanted more profitable work than fishing. I guess the answer can’t be “There was no ready access to medical care (remember your dead mom??) and getting essential supplies from the mainland during the winter was extremely touch-and-go,” which were the reasons Great Blasket Island was evacuated by the Irish government in 1954 and are perhaps too valid for the purposes of this story.

Fiona does indeed see the light from her bedroom window that night. But when she mentions it to Grandfather, he dismisses it—and the hope it’s given Fiona. Time to fill the audience in on what happened to Fiona’s baby brother, Jamie.

Flashback to Roan Inish on evacuation day a couple of years ago. Dad and Unnamed Older Brother are doing a final walkthrough of the cottages and have apparently just noticed that they’ve almost left an entire mattress behind. Jamie’s parked along the shoreline in his CradleBoat(TM), which is exactly what it sounds like, a wooden cradle shaped like a boat, with a curved bottom to rock on the waves. This right here is a tactical error; all the other kids have been loaded onto the evacuation ship, but the BABY is hanging back with the last of the luggage? This never would’ve happened if Mom had been alive. How many times, in the aftermath of Mom’s death, do you suppose Dad set down that CradleBoat in a random spot, forgot about it for like an hour, and then went “Ah well, he’s fine, no harm done”?

Maybe this incident of neglect is just the last straw for the island’s fauna. Or maybe, as Grandfather will come to believe, the sea is angry at the family for leaving the island. In any case, for whatever reason, the seals (*SEAL ALERT*) and their accomplices, the gulls, decide to (TWIST if you skipped the spoiler) kidnap Jamie.

The seals presumably chew through the rope that’s tethering the CradleBoat to something solid onshore. (You DID tether it, right, Dad???) They push it out into the water while the gulls distract Dad and Unnamed Older Brother by flapping in their faces. As the wind picks up and Dad belatedly notices his kid is floating away, the seals hustle the CradleBoat along into the open ocean, faster than Dad and Unnamed Older Brother can pursue. Impressive work. These seals should rob a casino next.

In the present, Fiona ventures, “He could still be out there,” to which Grandfather replies, “Cows could have wings, dear.” Nobody sugarcoats a single thing for this child and frankly I respect it.

Fiona, undeterred, convinces Grandfather to take her along on his next fishing expedition and drop her off on Roan Inish so she can hang out there for a few hours. I guess this is the sort of thing kids did before shopping malls existed. En route, they pass multiple lounging seals (*SEAL ALERT*), including the lil guy who was eyeing Fiona on her way to GrandparentsTown.

“His name is Jacks,” she informs Grandfather and Eamon matter-of factly.

“How do you know?” Eamon asks.

“It just is, that’s all.”

Sidenote: This’ll be my last seal alert. Just assume the seals are always around from here on out.

In her family’s derelict cottage, Fiona finds the following evidence of human activity:

Plus, walking along the shore, she spots some tiny footprints, which of course are immediately washed away by the tide and therefore inadmissible as evidence. But Fiona has seen enough: She knows Jamie is alive and is determined to find/retrieve him.

Soon afterward, her dad’s broody cousin Tadgh (John Lynch) fills her in on the family origin story.

Flashback to Roan Inish in the Way Long Ago Times: A young Coneelly incel stumbles upon a selkie—a human/seal hybrid—who’s shedding her skin to sunbathe. In human form, she’s hot. So while she’s zoned out and soaking up Vitamin D, Sketchy O’Sketchface Coneelly swipes her sealskin.

See, much in the way that control of the Strait of Hormuz determines the flow of oil in the Middle East, control of the sealskin determines the selkie’s fate. When she refocuses and can’t find her skin, she thinks, Welp, guess I gotta live on land now, and lets Red Flag Coneelly take her home. She MARRIES him, births an amount of kids I’ve never managed to definitively count but is clearly A LOT, originates the CradleBoat(TM), and eventually learns from her eldest child—named Fiona, as it happens!—that ole “Girl, Run” Coneelly has been hiding her second skin in his roof since the day he freaking met her.

Once she’s reunited with this protective layer of blubber, dermis, and fur, “neither chains of steel nor chains of love can keep her from the sea.” (As for which type of chain she associates with her husband, draw your own conclusions.) She ditches her enormous family and returns to seal form. But she’s often spotted offshore, keeping an eye on her descendants. And every so often, the Coneellys get a “dark one”—aka an objectively pale one with dark hair and dark eyes—who’s especially attuned to the sea. Tadgh is the dark one of his generation; Jamie was the latest.

Sidenote: Not a word about Unnamed Older Brother, who, in his two brief appearances, seems to have pretty dark hair too! Justice for Unnamed Older Brother in the sequel.

Tadgh does not radiate “good babysitter” energy, but he does treat Fiona like an equal. “She’s not easily frightened, this one,” he remarks when advised to tell a G-rated story. And he delivers one of my favorite lines: “Welcome back, Fiona Coneelly. We’ve been waiting.” Even though Fiona isn’t a special “dark one,” genetically predisposed to an affinity with the sea and her selkie heritage, she is the kind of person the family and the island need: somebody who’s curious, caring, and tenacious enough to listen to what nature and history are trying to tell her.

Fiona visits the island twice more on her own: first when Eamon has to “deliver parcels for the postman out among the smaller islands,” as one does, and secondly when—after Grandfather bars her from joining another fishing expedition on account of the foggy weather—her seal friend Jacks engineers a trip in a rogue rowboat. That’s the SECOND seal kidnapping, for those keeping track!

On both forays, Fiona spots Jamie with her own eyeballs. He’s now…

So both times Fiona sees him—”once on a hillside picking flowers, and once in a cottage having tea with a seal,” as she later convincingly recaps—he flees to his CradleBoat. When Fiona’s close to catching him, a seal flops right into her and trips her, cool as a cucumber.

She surmises that if her family returns to the island permanently, the seals will give Jamie back. Is this a stretch? Maybe for you, a hapless landlubber. But for Fiona, who’s been clocking the seals’ vibes and behavior from the get-go, it makes sense. The Coneellys, with their selkie connections and their deep knowledge of island life, belong on Roan Inish. Of course the seals were ticked that they bailed. Of course they stole a baby as collateral. Of course they’ll return the baby in exchange for the family reconnecting with their roots. Keep up!!!

The grandparents are about to get kicked out of their rental house, and they still own the land on Roan Inish, so this scheme isn’t actually that outlandish. What have they got to lose? Indoor plumbing? Electricity? lol. Welcome to 1940s Ireland; even on the mainland those are rare luxuries for country homes. Let’s break down the advantages of island living:

Seems like a no-brainer, really. Alas, when Fiona tries to tell Grandfather that Jamie is alive and has been Stockholm Syndromed by a pod of pinnipeds, he refuses to listen. He also forbids her from broaching the subject with Grandmother, who, despite being an indisputable firecracker, is deemed too emotionally fragile to even hear Jamie’s name. But Eamon believes Fiona, and he agrees to Fiona’s plan:

We’ve arrived at my favorite time: MONTAGE TIME. Fiona and Eamon do faster and more thorough work than any contractor I’ve ever hired. Over the course of three scenes, they clean, rethatch, and re-whitewash three cottages, not to mention plant a whole garden. Mason Daring’s first-rate soundtrack keeps the momentum going. The seals occasionally pop their heads up above the waves to monitor the progress and mug for the camera.

Back on the mainland, with a storm approaching, Fiona figures Jamie will take shelter on Roan Inish and could probably really use, like, a blanket. She speaks up to the grandparents, standing by her story, and—TWIST—Grandmother goes Yeah, that all checks out. So the grandparents join Fiona and Eamon on a trip to the island, where they’re blown away by the cottages’ transformation. And rightly so: I wish these kids would renovate my house.

As the storm gathers strength, Jamie washes ashore in his CradleBoat. He sees the bipeds waiting for him, freaks out, and tries to make a break for it. But TWIST: The seals exchange looks, do a quick huddle, and circle the wagons. They herd Jamie toward his human family and push the empty CradleBoat out to sea so he can’t escape. Once they’ve flopped away, leaving him to choose between the humans and Certain Death, he runs into Grandmother’s arms.

Fiona thanks the seals and assures them the Coneellys will be staying on Roan Inish. Inside the cozed-up cottage, Grandfather reflects, “She gave me her word. I didn’t believe it!” Fiona holds no grudges, though. She asks Jamie—now bundled up and full of seaweed soup—if he remembers her, and he sleepily echoes her name back to her. Outside, the seals have returned the CradleBoat to the shore and the night is calm.

Plot, pacing, and structure: 5. This is a tight, purposeful 103 minutes. Not a wasted moment, not a single throwaway shot, not an unnecessary line from start to finish. But it also never feels rushed, and it’s built as much on visual storytelling as on well-crafted dialogue. It’s by turns poignant, funny, and mysterious, with a core of emotional realism grounding the currents of magic and myth.

Characters: 5. Fiona is my role model; I want to be like her when I grow up. Eamon is a champion too. The grandparents are endearing, distinctive, and believable. Jamie is just a MacGuffin so he doesn’t need a personality, but that little kid’s expressions are pretty priceless. Even characters who appear only briefly and wordlessly in flashbacks, like Fiona’s mother and the selkie woman, feel fleshed out by the script and the acting. The seals, of course, rock.

Historical accuracy: 4. I have some questions about the costumes in the flashbacks, and all the actors use their regular accents, which creates a mix of Mayo, Dublin, and Northern Ireland that probably wasn’t the familial norm in 1940s Ulster. Oh, and I guess there’s no documentary evidence of selkies existing or of seals operating a benign mafia. But otherwise, seems pretty solid! There’s even a real island called Roan Inish (“island of the seals”) off the west coast of Donegal.

Themes: 5. The past is part of us, and we can’t move forward if we ignore it. We’re connected to, and responsible for, the land and the life around us. We can accomplish impossible things with a good team, some practical skills, and a “never tell me the odds” attitude. Listen to old stories. Listen to young voices. Listen to your freaking heart. Don’t give up. And be nice to any seal you meet.