Most emotional movie I've seen in years

Rating: 9/10 (27 October 2012)

It is difficult to begin writing this review when you've left the cinema only hours ago feeling absolutely overwhelmed. My throat still tightens while I think of some scenes from the movie.
I'm not going to explain the plot cause we all know what happened in Thai and Sri Lanka in 2004. And this is a true story of the survival of a Spanish family on vacations.
The movie engages the audience from the get go, before the wave hit the hotel. The cinematography is exquisite; it has everything a hard and sad movie should have and none of the natural disasters's movies clichés. But when the water hits and the family gets torn apart the volume rises while we witness the pain and struggle of Maria, mother of 3, to stay alive and protect her family.
I have to admit that I was not ready for some scenes that came afterwords. The director shows everything, most notable Maria's injuries. One asks themselves of this is truly necessary, and I believe it is. While newspapers in Spain talked about many people leaving the theater at this point (it didn't happened at my showing in Barcelona), I personally felt agony more than feeling sick from the images. You need to see it in order to feel it, and to remind yourself that this is as true as it can gets, and that this same thing could have happened to you and your family while on vacations. It just doesn't get more human than this movie.
Probably since Kate Winslet, I've never felt an actress deserving an Oscar nomination and win, but Naomi Watt's performance is nothing less than brilliant. This type of emotion, this type of connection both with the other characters and the audience is what acting is really all about. She's deserving of every season award there is. And I have a feeling that she doesn't even care about it. I felt her commitment to the family and to nothing else. Just bravo.
The young children, specially Lucas the oldest of the three, and the husband portrayed by Ewan McGregor are also great, but as another review stated above, the second part of the story that follows the husband's trip to find her missing child and wife was not as emotional or graphic as Maria's journey on the first part. There's absolutely no one to blame for this, it is just that Maria was the one who got injured the most, and as I stated, Watt's performance was on a league on its own. And for that reason alone I gave the movie a 9.
We need these type of movies and these type of professionalism and art to remind us more often of how lucky most of us are of being good and healthy. Life is fragile and every moment counts. And in the movie, every moment truly counts.