Not for the fainthearted

Film review: The Impossible (12A)
Running time 114 minutes
Rating:***
FEW of us really care to contemplate how much chance plays in our lives because the dilemma of trying to decide what to do for the best can lead to immobility.
Take, for example, the decision to sit in the shade of a stout palm tree on a Thai beach resort, as opposed to resting on the beach next to the azure lapping waters.
On every other day apart from Sunday, December 26, 2004, the consequences of such a decision would be meaningless and unimportant. But with a 30-foot-high tsunami crashing onto the beach, sweeping away everything in its path, the decision to be close to a tree turned out to be a lifesaving one.
For the Spanish Belon family – father, mother, three sons – that was their situation on the fateful day, when individuals lived or died according to chance, good fortune, luck, a miracle, God, or their own determination.
For an estimated 280,000 men, women and children, chance meant they died either in the instant of realisation, or later in the grim wreckage of a world gone mad.
The father (Ewan McGregor), managed to find two of his sons - Thomas and Simon (Oaklee Prendergast, Samuel Joslin) – uninjured and up a tree. However, mother (Naomi Watts) and eldest son Lucas (Tom Holland) were swept inland, with mother’s leg badly gashed.
The rest of the film is of the family’s search for each other in the turmoil of one of the world’s worst-ever disasters.
The search revealed how we hope we would all behave – loyal, strong, determined and, without being flippant, just a little lucky.
This is not a film for the faint hearted. Although rated as a 12A, the rollercoaster of emotions and the extent of the disaster is truly upsetting.
Certainly, the characters selected, and the incidents shown, are on the positive side, with the kind and gentle Thai people emerging with the greatest credit.
This is not a documentary, seeking to portray the truth. It is a feature film with a story – based on a kind of truth – about something that it is almost impossible to show without some kind of angle.
Director Juan Antonio Bayona has been controlled and moderate in his scenes, using music sparingly and sparing us the worst of the visions of death.
The acting, especially from the children, is sensitive and believable. The photography, shot mainly in a swimming pool in Spain, is realistic, especially showing the chaos of people swept away in the tumbling waters.
The ending, perhaps inevitably, is about the chances of survival, but you can’t help but think uncomfortably of the decisions people made – left or right, stay or go – that led to them being one of the 280,000 whom chance passed by.