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The Impossible (R16, 113mins) Directed by Juan Antonio Bayona ****½
Intimate yet epic, ugly yet touching and hauntingly beautiful, Spanish director Juan Antonio Bayona’s (The Orphanage) powerful 2012 take on how the 2004 Boxing Day Southeast Asia tsunami affected one family sweeps audiences away on a tide of emotions.
Yes, the story of Spain’s Belon family was anglicised to accommodate the star power and box-office draw of British-born actors Naomi Watts and Ewan McGregor, but more importantly it wasn’t Hollywoodised. This is a distinctly unglamorous tale, with both actors bloodied and broken as they – and us –are placed in the middle of the watery hell and its aftermath.
As Maria (Watts) and Henry (McGregor) and their three young boys arrive in Thailand for their Christmas break, their only concerns appear to be whether they left the alarm on in their Japanese apartment and whether restructuring at Henry’s work might see him out of a job.
However, that all pales into insignificance when Khao Lak’s Orchid Beach Resort is smashed by a seemingly endless surge of water which rips the family apart. When it subsides, it leaves Maria clinging to life and her eldest child Lucas (Marvel’s most recent Spider-Man Tom Holland in his big-screen debut) and fretting on the fate of the others.
While Clint Eastwood’s much-maligned 2010 tale Hereafter perhaps produced a more terrifying tsunami, its human drama isn’t a patch on the harrowing and heart-wrenching tale that unfolds here.
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Tom Holland made his big-screen debut opposite Naomi Watts in The Impossible.
With the help of Maria Belon herself, Sergio G Sanchez’s (The Orphanage) taut and tear-stained script never overplays its hand when it comes to sentimentality and cleverly keeps the audience in the dark (sometimes literally) for as long as possible about the fate of some characters. Its particular masterstroke is its tight focus on the one family (not trying to shoehorn all manner of others into the tale) while showing how their plight compares and contrasts with others (of all nationalities and walks of life) in the same situation. As we in New Zealand know all too well, natural disasters can be a great leveller.
However, while Watts (Penguin Bloom), McGregor (Obi-Wan Kenobi) and young Holland deserve plenty of plaudits for their heartfelt performances and Fernando Velazquez (Julia’s Eyes) delivers a truly haunting score, it’s director Bayona who should take the lion’s share of the kudos. This is a film of no little art. From the wave-crash mimicking jet plane roar of the opening scene to the deliberate sound-only moments when the first wave hits, sound has rarely been used in such a dramatic and unsettling way.
It’s also visually impressive, with terrific use of reflections, point-of-view shots and surface-bobbing camerawork that places you square in the deluge of debris and Bayona’s fabulous technique of occasionally pulling back from the central action in order to show the wider devastation and the sea of human misery that surrounds our protagonists.
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The Impossible is a rare disaster movie that focuses on feelings, human connections and emotions rather than destruction-porn – and is all the more compelling for it.
There are also echoes of the best of Steven Spielberg in Bayona’s work. He initially presents the ocean as a kind of Jaws-like monster to be feared, while Lucas’s literal and metaphorical journey brings back memories of Christian Bale’s in the highly underrated Empire of the Sun.
Some might bridle at the less than subtle cola product placement (surely adidas would have been a better fit given their “Impossible is nothing” tagline and Thai links at the time of the film’s release), but this is a rare disaster movie that focuses on feelings, human connections and emotions rather than destruction-porn – and is all the more compelling for it.
The Impossible is now streaming on Netflix.
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