The Impossible
Despair, pain, panic and hope fight for supremacy in this outstandingly made and heartwrenching film, based on the true-life story of a Spanish family who went on a Christmas holiday in Thailand in 2004 and were caught up in the tsunami that hit south-east Asia, killing 230,000 people. With simplicity and conviction, it manages to be something other than a conventional disaster movie. The tsunami sequence itself is a masterly piece of film-making – and as for what follows, I have to admit to being blindsided by its real emotional power. This film is of course vulnerable to charges of manipulation, and of magnifying the western-tourist experience at the expense of the indigenous communities who lost everything. But in the end I found honesty and compassion in The Impossible. It could well be Ewan McGregor's finest hour, and there were long sections that I had to watch through a wobbly blur of tears.
The deluge itself is viscerally real and almost unwatchable. Clint Eastwood's 2010 movie Hereafter began with a similar scene, a reconstruction of the tsunami that was well made and certainly far superior to the rest of his film, on a similar subject. But Bayona's version is markedly better, created with colossal technical flair.
And so The Impossible carries on, with some uncompromisingly big lachrymose moments and near-miss suspense scenes. The overhead shot showing dead bodies laid out with military organisation and precision nowhere visible in the shattered world of the living is a shock. This film is not especially complex, and not subtle, but there is judgment and intelligence in the simple idea of survival being the most agonising thing, and making survivor guilt the psychological aftershock of a shattering and irreparable blow.
Here is a searing film of human tragedy.
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