J. A. Bayona’s The Impossible opens on Dr. Maria Bennett and her family arriving at the Orchid Beach Resort in Khao Lak, Thailand, on Christmas Eve, 2004. Two days later, the Indian Ocean tsunami hits. The film’s promise is set in that gap: this will be a story about what the sea takes and what people do afterward. It keeps that promise unevenly, but it keeps it.
Trailer, via The Dollar Theater.
Maria Bennett and the Wall of Black Water
The film follows Maria, her husband Henry, and their three sons — Lucas, Thomas, and Simon — on their winter holiday. Two days after Christmas, a roar rises from the sea and a wall of black water devours everything in its path. The sequence is the film’s most accomplished passage, and Bayona does not cut away from it. Maria and Lucas survive by clinging to debris, though Maria sustains serious injuries to her leg and chest.
Naomi Watts plays Maria, and the part is the film’s center of gravity. Watts was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Actress, the Golden Globe Award for Best Actress – Motion Picture Drama, and the Screen Actors Guild Award for Outstanding Performance by a Female Actor in a Leading Role. Those nominations are not a mystery. The performance is physical in a way that most disaster films avoid, and it never asks for sympathy it hasn’t earned.
Ewan McGregor plays Henry, and Tom Holland plays Lucas in his live-action film debut. The younger brothers are Samuel Joslin as Thomas and Oaklee Pendergast as Simon.
A Toddler Named Daniel and the Road to Takua Pa
Maria and Lucas help a toddler, Daniel. Local people find the three of them and move them to a hospital in the city of Takua Pa. Daniel is separated from them during the journey — a small loss the film treats with the weight it deserves, because the film understands that in a tsunami, separation is the ordinary condition, not the exception.
At the hospital, Maria tells Lucas to help other people find their families while she goes into surgery. That instruction is the moral engine of the entire film. Lucas is a boy in a hospital full of the injured and the missing, and his mother, bleeding and broken, sends him out to be useful. It is the best-written moment in Sergio G. Sánchez’s screenplay, and it does more work than any of the film’s later reunions.
Henry Bennett and a Borrowed Cell Phone
Henry survives with Simon and Thomas. He leaves the two younger boys with another family, who are taken to the mountains for safety by local relief crews. Henry stays behind to search the rubble for Maria and Lucas.
Injured and alone, he is picked up by a passer-by and driven to a bus station crowded with other survivors. Communication is scarce. A German tourist named Karl, played by Sönke Möhring, has also been separated from his family, and he lends Henry his cell phone. Henry calls Maria’s father and promises him that he will look everywhere for Maria and Lucas.
Karl volunteers to join the search, and to look for his own family, who were at the beach when the tsunami hit. This is the film’s second engine: two men with nothing in common except a missing family, sharing a phone and a search. It is also where The Impossible is at its most honest. The help is small, practical, and unglamorous.
Nothing is more powerful than the human spirit.
Muriel Barnes and the Chart That Lies
While Maria is in surgery, her medical chart is mixed up with that of a woman named Muriel Barnes, who has died. Lucas comes back to find his mother’s bed empty. He is taken to a tent where children without families are kept safe, and he assumes his mother is dead. He is devastated. The mistake is discovered when Lucas cannot identify any of the bodies.
This is the film’s cruelest device, and its most effective one. A clerical error, not the wave, is what breaks Lucas. That is a real observation about disaster: the water is only the first thing that goes wrong. What follows — the charts, the tents, the lists — is where people actually get lost.
What the Film Does With Its Kindness
The film’s closing movement is built on unexpected displays of kindness and courage. Marta Etura plays Simone. Geraldine Chaplin appears as an Old Woman. Ploy Jindachote plays a Caregiver, Jomjaoi Sae-Limh as a Red Cross Nurse, and Johan Sundberg and Jan Roland Sundberg appear as Daniel and Daniel’s father.
The cast is international, and the film uses that. The Impossible is a 2012 English-language Spanish biographical disaster drama film — Lo imposible — directed by Bayona and written by Sánchez, and based on the experience of María Belón and her family in the 2004 tsunami. That provenance matters, because the film’s restraint around the disaster is the restraint of people who were in it.
Where the Film Pushes Too Hard
The Impossible runs 113 minutes and is classified as drama, thriller, and history. The thriller instinct is the problem. Bayona stages the tsunami with real craft, then keeps reaching for a feeling the film has already delivered.
The tagline — “Nothing is more powerful than the human spirit” — is exactly the kind of line the film should not need, and mostly doesn’t. When The Impossible stays with the hospital, the bus station, and the tent, it is a serious film about what people do when the systems around them fail. When it reaches for the tagline, it becomes a film about itself.
The performances hold. Watts carries the physical collapse and the recovery without a single false note. Holland, in his live-action debut, plays Lucas as a boy who is frightened and useful at the same time, which is harder than it sounds.
The Verdict on The Impossible
The Impossible received positive reviews from critics for its direction and acting, and that consensus is correct as far as it goes. The direction is confident and the acting is the reason to watch. But the film’s real achievement is narrower and more specific than its reputation suggests: it is a movie about paperwork, tents, and borrowed phones, dressed as a movie about a wave.
That is not a complaint. The water is the opening, not the whole. The rest is the part that stays with you, and it is the part the film should have trusted more. The chart mix-up, the empty bed, the tent full of children — those scenes are the argument. The tagline is the marketing.
This is a film worth seeing for Watts and for the hospital sequence. It is one family’s account, told with craft and a little too much insistence.
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