The
Impossible
Look
out. Here comes a very scary and very real disaster tale "The
Impossible" by Guillermo del Toro favorite J.A. Bayona who directed
"The Orphanage" (2007).
"The
Impossible" based on the devastating tsunami that struck Thailand in '04,
is essentially a horror story in which the natural world is one vast murderous
demon without form or ego that
pulverizes everything in its salty, viral wake.
At
the start, Maria Bennett (Naomi Watts) is on a plane with her three children
and her husband Henry (Ewan McGregor). She is nervous and fretful and the
camera is as hectic as a Lars von Trier film during the onset of a marital
fight. Maria is nervous about turbulence, but all is well after a few jarring
moments
False
alarm.
The
plane lands in Paradise, that is Thailand and the family is welcomed into a
tropical yet pristine resort complex that seems like a spaceship on the sand
with all the amenities. We see a foreboding caption on the screen:
CHRISTMAS
EVE.
It
hits like a punch.
Lucas,
the older son, reaches for a Coke and then puts it back. Even the can looks
demonic: forbidden carbonation, a harbinger of things to come.
Then
it is Christmas. After the kids attack the presents like a flurry of seagulls
in Hitchcock's "The Birds", the young one can't sleep.
In
fright flicks, this is invariably a precursor to bad things. When morning
rises, the kids plunge into the crystal blue
pool and the perspective quotes directly from "Jaws" as the
young energetic limbs churn wildly under the surface.
A
sudden gust of wind arises, disquieting and unwelcome. Lucas bounces a red ball
and it rolls in a deliberate slowness
that recalls Damien's churning red tricycle in the 1970's scare "The
Omen".
Then
there is a roar followed by a glimpse of
rushing surf that appears like a flurry of rabid bats. Palms fall like
toothpicks. The family stands still as if held under a satanic Polaroid.
The
screen goes dark.
What
emerges are sequences of pain and gory endurance that are almost as hard to
watch as Lars von Trier's "Antichrist". Maria is swept in a
maelstrom. She gives unholy screams. Her head is badly bashed and bloody.
She quickly holds onto a stump and claws
for her life. Lucas is here too and he is fighting for his own survival as well, both of them caught in their unique
cyclones that seem individually made in a psychotic, yet sentient design.
Mom
is covered in blood and her breast is savagely torn open, revealing some gore
underneath to her son's horror.
As
bloody as these scenes are, they are riveting and you will be rooting for Maria
the whole way through as she screams and hollers and drips with almost as much
Passion Play pain as Jim Caviezel once suffered through.
The
father's condition, although his legs are streaked with blood, appears a bit
better. He's holed up with the two kids and resolves, as most of us would to
find Lucas and Maria, although I did wonder why he did not clean his wounds.
The
heart of the story though, not to shortchange the role of fathers, is the
relationship of Mom to her son Lucas, played with great emotional strength by
newcomer Tom Holland.
Beyond
that, the energy in the film is in its depiction of a violent earth which is
arbitrary but no less malevolent. When Maria gets violently sick at the sight
of a bedmate vomiting, the scene could be taken right from David Cronenberg's
early body shockers. The retching is as repulsive and upsetting as any
Exorcist-like tingler, but praise should
be given to Bayona who never allows his story to drift into camp and
circumstance.
Perhaps
the message of the film is that nature is very much out to destroy us.
The
Impossible" reveals a duplicitous parallel world of danger that very
possibly, co-exists within our own.
Write
Ian at redtv_2005@yahoo.com
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