Best known for her role as Downton Abbey’s aristocratic rebel, Jessica Brown Findlay slips down the social scale to play an even spunkier heroine in British coming-of-age drama Albatross. Emelia is a wayward 17-year-old orphan who explodes like an incendiary bomb in the household of blocked writer Jonathan (Sebastian Koch), his bitter wife (Julia Ormond) and their brainy but shy daughter (Felicity Jones) when she takes a job as a cleaner at the seaside hotel they own. In the fallout, everyone’s life gets shaken up, including aspiring author Emelia’s. We’ve seen this sort of rites-of-passage movie many times before, of course, but Brown Findlay’s feisty livewire gives the film the spark lacking in the routine plot.
Released on DVD on Monday 6th February by Entertainment One.
