Love Among the Ruins

2 minute read
Mary Pols

Based on a Spanish family’s experiences during the devastating South Asian tsunami, The Impossible opens with a dull roar and darkness. A calm blue ocean appears, then a plane screams into the frame as if launched from the projection booth, jolting you into the film’s turbulent reality. Juan Antonio Bayona’s film is a technological marvel, but it’s also emotionally rich and life-affirming.

The family has been recast as British: Henry Belon (Ewan McGregor), wife Maria (Naomi Watts) and their three young sons, who are vacationing in Thailand over winter break. After the tidal wave hits, mother and eldest son Lucas (the fiercely good Tom Holland) are battered and bloody–Mom horribly so–but together. As they wade waist-deep through an apocalyptic landscape, you feel them forming their own tough little unit.

There are saving graces, like a can of Coke plucked intact from the wreckage or the affections of a little boy they rescue. The kindness of strangers leads Maria and Lucas to a hospital filled with the wounded, who cry for lost loved ones. “You see that boy?” Maria implores a doctor. “I’m all he’s got in the world.” The odds of her survival become the movie’s main source of suspense.

As disaster porn, The Impossible is as sobering as it is impressive; it gives you an almost nauseating sense of what it would be like to be keelhauled through populated areas. It’s worth noting that the impact would have been no less horrifying had the Belon family remained Spanish and been played by, say, Javier Bardem and Penlope Cruz. That the vast majority of the tsunami’s approximately 230,000 victims were not the white, well-heeled Westerners we see here–well, that’s typical of the movie business but no less bothersome.

That said, Holland and especially Watts deserve to be in contention this awards season. Even when Maria is at her lowest ebb, an oxygen mask hiding her face, Watts keeps her constantly connecting–with Lucas, with other victims and with the audience. From an always superlative actress comes an almost impossibly convincing performance. (In select theaters Dec. 21)

More Must-Reads from TIME

Contact us at letters@time.com