9 / 10
The Impossible is the best disaster film of the twenty-first century.
J.A. Bayona directed it. Naomi Watts plays Maria Bennett, a doctor on Christmas vacation in Thailand with her husband and three sons when the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami hits their resort. Ewan McGregor plays Henry. Tom Holland makes his film debut as the eldest son Lucas. The story is real. The Maria character is based on Maria Belón, a Spanish doctor whose family survived the actual event. The film is hers, told through the family’s eyes.
What separates The Impossible from other disaster films is that the disaster is mostly over by the end of the first act. The tsunami hits at the eight-minute mark. The rest of the film is about survival, separation, and the slow work of finding each other again in a country whose infrastructure has been destroyed.
This film puts me through the wringer, and that’s what earns it the 9. Most disaster movies want you to enjoy the spectacle. Bayona wants you to feel the water, then spends the rest of the film making you wait to find out who’s still alive, and I find that wait harder to sit through than the wave itself.
The Tsunami Sequence
The wave itself is shot in a single continuous sequence that runs roughly six minutes.
Bayona used a combination of practical water tanks and CGI, but the practical work is dominant. Naomi Watts performed most of the scene herself in a water tank. The wave comes from behind her. She turns. The shot doesn’t cut away. She’s pulled under. The camera goes with her.
The sequence is the most physically punishing depiction of natural disaster I know of, and I had to remind myself to breathe. The film doesn’t romanticize the violence.
The water carries debris, and the debris hits the body. At one point a tree branch impales Maria. Lucas is bruised, cut, and exhausted. They surface in flooded country that looks nothing like a movie set, and I believed every frame of it.
For Writers
A disaster sequence works when the audience experiences the disaster instead of watching it. The Impossible’s tsunami is unbroken from the protagonist’s point of view. The reader is in the water with her. No cuts to other characters. No reaction shots from a safe distance. The lesson is that immersion in a disaster scene depends on staying inside the experience of one person. Reaction shots from outside the danger break the audience out of the danger. Stay inside.
The Hospital
Maria and Lucas reach a regional hospital that’s itself barely functioning. The scenes inside the hospital are some of the most uncomfortable in the film. Maria is dying from sepsis. Lucas is twelve and has been thrust into the role of his mother’s caretaker. The supporting cast of injured strangers and overwhelmed Thai staff is treated with respect. Bayona doesn’t romanticize Thai culture and doesn’t condescend to it. The hospital staff are working professionals doing impossible work with the resources available.
The decision to center Western tourists instead of Thai survivors has been criticized, and I think the criticism has merit. The real Belón family was Spanish, the film turns them into a British family, and it tells their story inside a tragedy that killed roughly two hundred and thirty thousand people, most of them locals. It’s the one flaw I can’t shrug off, and it’s why I stop short of a 10.
For Writers
A story told from the perspective of outsiders to a disaster has different responsibilities than a story told from the perspective of locals. The Impossible centers a Spanish family in a Thai catastrophe. The choice is defensible because the writer is telling the story of a specific family, but the choice has cost. The lesson is to know who’s centered in your story and what’s not centered as a result. Both decisions are choices. Both have consequences.
The Family
The eventual reunion of the family is intercut so that the audience doesn’t know who’s alive and who’s dead until the camera arrives.
The script withholds information ruthlessly. The viewer goes through the entire second act believing the worst because the characters believe the worst. When the family is finally reunited, the film doesn’t score the moment with strings. It just lets it happen, in a hospital courtyard, with people who don’t yet know they’re about to be alright.
Tom Holland’s performance is the one that moves me most. He was fourteen, and he carries the long middle stretch of the film while Watts is in surgery. The scenes where Lucas runs around the hospital trying to reunite other families with their loved ones are the heart of the movie for me, and they established him as a real actor before Marvel turned him into a brand.
For Writers
Withholding emotional resolution increases its power when it finally arrives. The Impossible could have intercut so the audience knew the family would survive. Instead, the film treats the audience the way the characters experience the situation. The lesson is that knowledge withheld from the protagonist should be withheld from the reader. Dramatic irony has its uses, but for emotional climax, parallel ignorance with the character is usually stronger.
Craft Note
J.A. Bayona directed. Sergio G. Sánchez wrote. Naomi Watts as Maria Bennett. Ewan McGregor as Henry Bennett. Tom Holland (film debut) as Lucas. Samuel Joslin and Oaklee Pendergast as the younger sons. Geraldine Chaplin in a small role. Based on the real experience of Maria Belón and her family during the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami. Filmed in Spain and Thailand. Released October 2012 in Spain. Approximately forty-five million dollar budget. One hundred and eighty million worldwide gross. Naomi Watts nominated for Best Actress Oscar.
Is The Impossible as good as people say?
9/10. I’d put the wave up against any disaster sequence ever filmed, Watts and Holland give everything they’ve got, and the reunion in that hospital deserved every tear it pulled out of me. The only thing holding it back is the choice to center a Western tourist family in a Thai disaster, a choice I can understand and still find limiting. Watch it. Be prepared for the wave.
