The Impossible
★★★★
(2012)
If the young Catalan, Juan Antonio Bayona nearly bettered his producer, director Guillermo Del Toro in the scary stakes with his allegorical debut horror film The Orphanage, he has surely challenged himself to no end with a different type of terror in his second, The Impossible. Though miles apart in tone and focusing on real human horror, it excels as a simple well built, sheer, palm sweating survival tale, documenting 2 days in the lives of one of many families caught by the Boxing Day Tsunami on a resort in Thailand. Though it is a confident, assured, high tension film which is exhausting to watch, the film also sniffs out scenes of great character and it’s final emotional punch is undeniable.
Maria (Naomi Watts) and Henry (Ewan McGregor) are settling into their holiday from their busy life in Japan when the wave strikes. Sweeping Maria and her eldest son, Lucas (Tom Holland) in one direction and her husband and their youngest two boys in another. Separated and desperate, the story of survival that unfolds is brilliantly focused on a shift roles for the injured mother and the son and of a father’s exhausted search for them.
As plot goes there isn’t much else to tell but there is a lot to watch (or not) depending on how strong your stomach is. As we well know, Bayona never shies away from a lingering close up of a body wound and has a keen knack for lengthening tension to incredible degrees but there is far more than gore and galloping heart rates here. The sound design of The Impossible is enough alone to give you nightmares. Swirling water and roaring waves feel like they are completely surrounding and suffocating thanks to an enveloping 3D sound recording technology. The bright over saturated cinematography also somehow heightens the horror on show, splashing sun kissed tropical light over every inch of the mess, and importantly, the cast are excellent all round.
Watts gives an amazing, physically draining performance. McGregor chalks up another terrific role and, especially in a scene in which he calls Maria’s father, nearly pulls your heart strings clean out of your chest. The young cast are also spectacular, Holland especially as he attempts both to take care of his mother and keep them together. The Impossible is obviously and bluntly an emotional steamroller, sometimes slightly heavy handed in emotive “cue” music but it’s miraculously always careful in avoiding the crushing of character because of it. And, all the while deftly never letting any dust settle either.
Bayona and The Orphanage writer Sergio G. Sanchez, always respectful of the family on which the true story is based, somehow manage to make us care and hope for everything to be OK even before the inevitable natural disaster shows up. After all, we’ve all seen the poster and the trailers. In turn they’ve made The Impossible, a disaster movie which actually manages to survive beyond the CGI terror of the disaster itself and humbly crafts a great and powerfully effective piece of work about the hope of a family in absolute danger.
