By Jeremy Smith

Copyright slashfilm

13 years ago, I received an invite to a long-lead screening for a new J.A. Bayona movie. I had no idea what it was about, and preferred to keep it that way. As I entered the screening room, I refused the one-sheet synopsis from the publicist and parked myself in a seat as far away as possible from the other attendees (of which there were mercifully few). All I needed to know was that this was the sophomore effort from the enormously talented filmmaker who gave us the expertly crafted chiller “The Orphanage,” and that it had inexplicably taken him five years to follow it up. Needless to say, I had high expectations.

“The Impossible” documents the true story of Maria Belón, who, with her family, survived the devastating 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami that killed over 220,000 people. It was not at all what I expected from Bayona, but it did prove with a harrowing vengeance that this man is an A-list director equipped with astonishing technical skills. The oceanic fury unleashed by the 9.2 earthquake is captured with horrific authenticity that leaves you gasping for breath. The entire sequence rattled me to such a trembling degree that I almost had to bolt the theater. But Bayona is no Irwin Allen or Roland Emmerich; he’s not hurtling disaster at you as a means of glad-that’s-not-me exhilaration. Before literally flooding our senses, he spent an economical amount of time establishing his characters. In a lot of movies, these scenes might’ve been insufficient to ground us in the lives of this family, but Bayona and his casting team of Shaheen Baig, Eva Leira, Howard Meltzer, and Yolanda Serrano hit the bullseye with every choice. Naomi Watts and Ewan McGregor as the parents, Samuel Joslin and Oaklee Pendergast as the younger sons, and the breakthrough performer of the film, Tom Holland, as the older brother.

I had no sense of Holland before I saw “The Impossible,” but walking out of that screening, I knew I’d seen one of the best child performances of all time.