Home Competitions Features Suggestion box Subscribe to Time Out

Explore

What's happening



Follow

Latest issue

  • Issue number 74 editorial
  • Click to open full size picture
  • Click to see the latest newsletter


The Impossible

Drama,

Film,

Film review,

Things to see

1

Poll



  • Print this page Print
  •  
  • E-mail this page Email
  •  
The Impossible
First published on . Updated on 14 Jan 2013.

There’s something unsavoury about making an uplifting epic about the tsunamis of 2004 – especially one focusing exclusively on the plight of vacationing Westerners who faced the devastation. That about sums up The Impossible, a sentimental slog that encourages us to celebrate the survival of European tourists while turning a blind eye to the deaths of thousands of others. The film tells the true story of a wealthy Spanish family, visiting Thailand for the holidays, that finds its coastal R & R violently cut short by an enormous crashing wave. Badly injured in the storm, Maria (Naomi Watts) and her young son Lucas (Tom Holland) set out for higher ground. But what of Henry (Ewan McGregor), the husband and father of the clan, and Lucas’s two younger brothers?

Director Juan Antonio Bayona, who made the high-minded Spanish horror flick The Orphanage, lends the tsunami sequence a harrowing intensity. After that, however, there’s not much else he does but train his jittery lens on mud-and-tear-streaked faces—though, notably, only those of the leads’ fellow white survivors. (Is this Thai community populated entirely by crying blond moppets and strapping Spaniards?) Watts takes on the burden of her ordeal with masochistic conviction, bellowing to the heavens and wearing each bruise and gaping leg wound like a badge of honor. Talk about a disaster movie. A A Dowd
  • Print this page Print
  •  
  • E-mail this page Email
  •  

The Impossible details

Length: 108 minutes

Country of origin: Spain

Year of production: 2012

Director: Juan Antonio Bayona

Cast: Naomi Watts, Ewan McGregor, Tom Holland

The Impossible website

Readers' comments

 

© 2007 - 2013 Time Out Group Ltd. All rights reserved. All material on this site is © Time Out.