Movie Review of The Impossible (2012)

English physician Maria and her Scottish husband Henry had taken their three young sons on a Christmas holiday to Thailand, when the tsunami hit.

One moment, Maria was relaxing beside the pool with a good book, while Henry and the boys played ball in the pool.  The next, the whole scene was destroyed.

There was no visible pool. There was barely a hotel standing. Destruction stretched for as far as the eye could see. Bodies and deadly debris floated in the water. This was not a case of brace yourself and survive it. People were swept miles away on a raging current. Hundreds of thousands more lost their lives.

It all happened so fast. An instant of rumbling, then all of reality turned on its head. For those not killed immediately, the aftermath was a desperate fight for survival. The hours, days, weeks and months which followed constituted a confusion of reaching medical assistance, finding your loved ones (or identifying their remains, or never knowing what happened to them), counting the cost and putting your lives together again.

So what if you had a lost five year old in all of that?  Or a seven and half year old?  A thirteen year old?  Your husband or wife? 

That's precisely what happened to the Belon family, and The Impossible recreates their story blow by blow.

Director Juan Antonio Bayona and writer Sergio G. Sánchez were well aware that they were recreating a very recent disaster.

They were determined from the outset to make this as faithful as possible to real life events, out of respect for those who lived through it and those who were lost.

Initial filming took place in Spain, but then the entire cast and crew relocated to Thailand for several months. They were in the exact place where the Belon family stayed during the Indian Ocean tsunami disaster.

Everyone around them had survived it. Most of the extras in The Impossible had experienced the reality. They each had their own stories of homes in rubble - or washed away entirely - family and friends killed, and their struggle to make it through the disaster itself. They relived those moments in miniature in the background shots.

The Belon family came to Thailand for filming too.  Tom Holland - an unbelievably talented thirteen year old actor - has talked about how the real life Lucas went through the script with him, and told him all those private things that only Lucas could have known. While Tom portrayed him before the camera, Lucas was watching behind it.

Actress Naomi Watts has equally related how some scenes so overwhelmed her, that she reached out for the real Maria Belon for comfort and connection!

The Bechdel Test asks that there be at least two named female characters in a movie. They must converse with each other. The subject of that conversation cannot be a male character.

I thought that The Impossible passed with flying colors.  Maria is the only main female role, but her desperate journey brought her into contact with many more of her gender.

There were the Thai ladies in a ruined village, who provided First Aid and saw her safely to a hospital. Once there, Maria was surrounded by women. She has a very poignant interaction with a fellow patient, which doesn't once mention their men. She discussed her injuries with a female doctor. She was tended by a female nurse.

But none of them were named. It's hardly noticeable in the movie itself. It's only as I came to add their names here that I realized the cast list is full of such designations as 'red-headed woman', 'operating nurse' and 'patient in Takua Pa Hospital'.

The Bechdel Test demands NAMED characters, therefore none of those conversations count in the end. It's a crying shame, because it really should have passed.