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124 MINUTES | WEST NEWTON An ambitious New York workaholic inherits her grandmother’s inn on a faraway isle off the coast of Maine — but for Amanda (Lisa Brenner), the bucolic Maine coast is not all sunsets and lobster traps. When she returns to the island, she uncovers dark family secrets and confronts long-repressed memories of her tyrannical mother (Jeanetta Arnette) and sexual violence as she’s reunited with ghosts from the past including her grandmother (Louise Fletcher) and a childhood crush who remained on the island. A simplicity of style and storytelling imbues Lawrence David Foldes’s film an old-fashioned feel. Hallucinatory flashbacks propel the plot and explain the past, and the older generation of actors (Fletcher and Geneviève Bujold) gives the film dignity. But the younger characters are cardboard and cliché, and all the blossoming love and forgiveness is syrupy and predictable, just so much artificial sweetener.
BY NINA MACLAUGHLIN
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