So when you hear about this (and once you’ve gotten over your misconception that maybe it’s based on the Nicola Griffith novel, which it is not), it sounds a lot like Portrait of a Lady on Fire, right, with a Victorian-esque romance between two women set at the British seaside. But unfortunately, this one doesn’t work as well.

One of the protagonists is played by Kate Winslet, who is a legit movie star. And the thing about movie stars is that they bring themselves to whatever role they’re playing. Sometimes this doesn’t really work — I think here of how Julianne Moore, who is great, completely overshadowed her character with movie star presence in Gloria Bell in a way that Paulina García did not in Gloria — but sometimes it does. And this is the latter category: When we see a Kate Winslet who is in her mid-40s and looking it, with skin blown raw by the sea winds where her character is spending all her time fossil hunting, we get a sense of this character’s age and experience that we wouldn’t get from an unknown, just because we remember the younger Winslet in Heavenly Creatures and Titanic, lo these long decades ago. Winslet brings her movie star background to the film in a way that doesn’t overpower the character, but adds to it.

So that’s good. But then there’s not much left in the rest of the movie. The critique I’d heard of it before I saw it was that it was cold and cerebral, and that the romance between the two women was passionless, and that is super-true. Like, when they first start kissing, I thought they were actually just going to fall into each other’s arms, sobbing; there wasn’t even remotely any sense of suppressed longing bursting to the surface or anything, there was seemingly barely any connection at all between the characters.

You can imagine why Saoirse’s character — a young woman trapped in an apparently loveless marriage — would admire Winslet’s fiercely independent fossil hunter, but it’s not at all clear why the feeling would be reciprocated. By which I mean, you could imagine reasons why it would, you can tell your own story about how that would work, but none of that is in the movie itself. Near the end, when Ronan’s character invites Winslet to stay with her, Winslet rebuffs her advances in a way that seems far more in character for her, with her prickly determination to not be tied to someone else and to just be able to do her fossil hunting work.

But really, more than anything else, the movie seems determined to make us feel a sense of cold chill. Not only is the relationship itself somewhat distant, but the movie is color graded to a consistent gray-blue throughout, and the sound is heavy on the crashing waves and ocean gusts. I wanted an extra sweater just watching it.

This isn’t a bad movie. Kate Winslet’s performance is great, in its reserved and prickly way. But the movie is so much like Portrait of a Lady on Fire, which is so much better, that it’s hard to really recommend. I guess watch it if you feel like it, but don’t go out of your way to do so, and probably watch Céline Sciamma’s movie first.