The story, set on the west coast of Ulster in the north-west of Ireland, is about Fiona, a young girl who is sent to live with her grandparents and her cousin Eamon near the island of Roan Inish, where the selkies are rumored to reside.

Set in 1946, the story is told from the point of view of Fiona (Jeni Courtney), a young girl who is sent to live with her grandparents in an Irish fishing village, after the death of her mother, illness of her father, and her own failing health.

In the evenings, her grandfather tells tales about the family's history, including the evacuation from their generational home on the tiny island of Roan Inish during the Second World War.

Fiona hears details about how the sea seemed to steal her infant brother, Jamie, during the departure from Roan Inish, bobbing out of sight in his little cradle boat, some years earlier, never to be seen again.

Her cousin, Eamon, who also lives near the grandparents for his health, often accompanies the Grandfather in his curragh - fishing boat - on daily errands to the islands including Roan Inish.

Her grandmother is wise and unhesitant - rising to her feet and to the moment, her body and actions say: if there is any chance the child lives, when thought dead these years, rescue must be immediate.

Jamie's tiny cradle bobs to shore and he jumps out, heading for the cottages to escape the storm, shepherded to safety lovingly by the seals, as they'd probably been doing all along.

Without ostentation or self-consciousness, the film immerses you in the spume, fog and glare of the seaside life, with its temporal mysteries and its organic metamorphoses.

Mason Daring's spare, traditional Irish score adds one more layer of melancholy atmosphere," noted Scott Rosenberg of SFGate.

Scott Rosenberg of SFGate describes it as being "a lot like the island it's named after: It seems to occupy a time of its own, cut off from the speed and overload of contemporary life and drifting to its own ancient rhythms.

Photographed by Haskell Wexler on Ireland's rugged northwestern seacoast, it is a cinematic tone poem in which man and nature, myth and reality flow together in a way that makes them ultimately indivisible.