Movie / The Impossible

I usually come out of real life disaster movies feeling a bit hollow. There’s no denying that these tales of brutal loss and extreme survival can be powerful and emotional, but I can never shake the feeling of it all being shot through the eyes of an accolade-hungry director, looking for an easy path to movie stardom.

It gives me great relief, then, to state that The Impossible, for all its violins and teary-eyed trauma, did not give me such a feeling. This Juan Antonio Bayona-helmed flick is a genuinely shocking, eye-opening experience that serves to perfectly capture the sheer terror of one of the most tragic events of the past decade.

The film follows everyman Henry (Ewan McGregor), his wife Maria (Naomi Watts), and their three young sons – a holidaymaking family, literally swept up in the events of the 2004 Indian Ocean Tsunami.

It’s this casting that gives the first sign of the film’s more genuine intentions. McGregor, an actor with an admirable amount of charity work under his belt, is no stranger to blockbusters and rom coms, but here he adopts a strikingly down-to-earth approach as a father taking a well-earned rest from busy work life. In fact, he and Watts are so relatable and undramatised in the first 20 minutes that it’s easy to forget the horror that awaits them.

But don’t be tricked by the film’s picturesque opening and especially don’t let the extremely generous 12a rating fool you – when the disaster hits, The Impossible doesn’t hold back.

The film is often unflinchingly graphic to the point of leaving all but the most steel-bellied of viewers squirming in their seats. It’s to Bayona’s credit that there really are no compromises within the story - nothing left up to the imagination or flimsily hinted at. Watching The Impossible is an immensely uncomfortable experience and so should it be, given the astonishing subject matter.

The plot beats are somewhat predictable from about half an hour inwards, yet equally as forgivable given the factual nature of its source material. McGregor and Watts shift effortlessly from relaxed to terrified parents, each getting their turn to break the audiences heart with terrific acting that crucially feels real. Rising star Tom Holland, playing the parent’s eldest son, is too worthy of applause for his turn as a teenager fighting for his bravery in an ever-worsening situation.

It would have been easy for The Impossible to shimmy through on auto-pilot, lazily showcasing exploitative situations without any real depth to, complete with a preachy “oh isn’t this horrible” tone. Instead, it all but violently shakes your own seat to demand your attention, leaving a harrowing impact that gets you closer to the experience than you’d ever dared hope to go.

This is a compelling, all-encompassing tale that will more than once tempt the tears to flood. If it gets the awards then great, but the team behind it should be just as proud without them, and I suspect that they are indeed.