/ Critic
/ Gone to Ground (2025) | Dir. Phil Peel
/ ★½☆

It is August 12, 2026, and the long‑awaited solar eclipse crosses Europe while I am on a flight from Munich to Barcelona. Busy day for sungazers.

Eclipses have fascinated people since the beginning. The union of opposites playing out in the sky. The great shows of synchronicity in this corner of the galaxy.

Next to me, two teenagers talk in German and look carefully through the window. I ask if they are hoping to see the end of the eclipse (“it would be amazing to see that from the plane, right?”), but they say something about the plane going higher and higher. We try to talk and arrive at the good old language barrier. 

“Ele fazia medicina e falava alemão / e eu ainda nas aulinhas de inglês”. 

We stay quiet for the rest of the flight, with the dots of a small talk that didn’t work floating in the air.

I remembered the British film Gone to Ground, directed by Phillip Peel. For days I have been organizing my ideas to write about it. This attempt at conversation was the spark I needed.

The film begins with the a Polish girl called Magda getting involved in an accident in the countryside of England. She ends up on the land of Guy, a World War II veteran who lives a calm life of memories, soups, and crossword puzzles. When he decides to take care of the visitor, respecting her request not to call an ambulance, he commits carefully to connecting with her. The two go deeper into their stories until they receive a visit from one of the secrets of Magda’s mysterious past.

Peel wrote this script inspired by the letters from the war front that his father sent to his mother. The film is a creative exercise of a son putting a new perspective on a key moment in his father’s history: after a life dealing with demons from the past, what would it be like to welcome someone who just went through a similar trauma?

In general, Gone to Ground doesn’t quite move you emotionally. It manages to open space for a connection between the characters that transcends the language barrier… but this chemistry doesn’t hold throughout the film… just like its rhythm and editing. 

It insists on over-explains the same themes: Guy is an irritating old man, Magda has a hard shell. We are told this repeatedly. The script doesn’t trust us to figure it out.

Peel has a respectable technical résumé as a writer and director, with work on BBC television and even a cameo as a zombie in 28 Days Later (besides directing the extras of those zombies). Even so, he stumbles narratively and editorially, underestimating the audience in a script that sometimes sounds too insecure to reach the screen.

But one message stays: refusing to give up on connection. Even if ideas, generational differences, languages, and moods were opposites, the two tried hard to make it happen. It is not always that two people with this profile have this openness in unexpected encounters.

…

The flight landed. The teenagers and I never found our common language. But we tried. Gone to Ground, for all its stumbles, argues that trying is already something.