The Impossible (2012 film)

Theatrical release poster

Hayden Styles

Tom Holland

21 December 2012 (United States)

***The Impossible*** (Spanish: ***Lo Imposible***) is a 2012 disaster drama film directed by J. A. Bayona and written by Sergio G. Sánchez. It is based on the experience of María Belón and her family in the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami. The cast includes Naomi Watts, Ewan McGregor, Hayden Styles and Tom Holland.

The film received positive reviews from critics for its direction
 and its acting, especially for Watts who was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Actress, the Golden Globe Award for Best Actress – Motion Picture Drama, and a Screen Actors Guild Award for Outstanding Performance by a Female Actor in a Leading Role.

## Plot

Maria Bennett (Naomi Watts), her husband Henry (Ewan McGregor), and their three sons Lucas (Tom Holland), Thomas (Hayden Styles), and Simon (Oaklee Pendergast) go on a Christmas holiday in 2004 to Khao Lak, Thailand. Arriving on Christmas Eve, they settle in and begin to enjoy the brand new Orchid Beach Resort. Two days later on Boxing Day, the massive 2004 tsunami inundates the area.

Maria and Lucas eventually emerge from the swirling water and
find one another, with Maria having sustained serious injuries to her
leg and chest. They help a young boy, Daniel, from the wreckage and are
soon found by locals who transfer them to a local hospital in the city
of Takua Pa.
 Daniel is separated from them during the journey. At the hospital,
Maria encourages Lucas to help others find their family members while
she goes into surgery for her chest injuries.

Meanwhile, Henry, Thomas and Simon have also survived and are
together. Henry leaves the two boys with another family who head to the
mountains for safe shelter while he stays behind to search for Maria and
 Lucas. While out looking, injured and alone, he is picked up by a
passer-by and driven to a nearby bus shelter to wait out with other
survivors. Communication facilities are scarce but eventually a tourist
named Karl (Sönke Möhring),
 who has also been separated from his family, lends Henry his cell phone
 to contact his relatives. Henry promises Maria's father he will look
everywhere for his family and that he will find them. Karl tells the
group his wife had left him a note confirming they were at the beach,
their location when the wave hit. He volunteers to accompany Henry to
look for Maria and Lucas and his own family, too.

While Maria is in surgery, her medical chart is mixed-up with
another patient who has died. Lucas returns to find his mother's bed
empty and is then taken to a tent where children without families are
kept safe. The mistake is discovered when Lucas cannot identify any of
the dead woman's jewelry and he is subsequently reunited with his mother
 who has been moved to a private room in the ICU. In the hospital while he waits, Lucas finds Daniel who has been reunited with his father.

Henry and Karl search for their families in various places before
 they arrive at the hospital where Henry is given five minutes to look.
Karl gives him a piece of paper with his family members’ names on. The
vehicle carrying Thomas and Simon also stops outside the hospital and
the boys get off so Simon can urinate. From a distance, Lucas recognizes
 his father and while searching him out in the chaotic crowd outside,
Lucas' brothers spot him and they reunite. Henry finds the three of them
 together. He learns that Maria is in the hospital ready to undergo more
 surgery for her leg, which she survives. Flashbacks reveal how she came
 to be badly injured and how she surfaced the water. While in surgery,
Lucas tells his father he has something really important to tell Maria.

The following day, the family boards an ambulance airplane to Singapore
 so Maria may receive further medical treatment, arranged by their
insurance company. On the plane, Lucas tells his mother he knows Daniel
is safe. Maria looks out the window at the chaos left behind.

## Cast

* Naomi Watts as Maria Bennett, a doctor and the mother of the Bennett family.
* Ewan McGregor as Henry Bennett, the father of the Bennett family.
* Tom Holland as Lucas Bennett, the 12-year-old son.
* Hayden Styles as Thomas Bennett, the seven-and-a-half-year-old son.
* Oaklee Pendergast as Simon Bennett, the five-year-old son.
* Marta Etura as Simone
* Sönke Möhring as Karl Schweber, a German man trying to find his wife and daughter. He joins Henry to find their families.
* Geraldine Chaplin as the Old Woman
* Ploy Jindachote as the Caregiver
* Jomjaoi Sae-Limh as the Red Cross Nurse
* Nicola Harrison as the Woman in charge of Simon and Thomas

## Production

The film was a co-production of Spanish film companies Apaches Entertainment and Telecinco Cinema, and employed much of the crew from *The Orphanage*, including the director, writer, production manager, cinematographer, composer, and editor. Principal photography began 23 August 2010, in Alicante, Spain, and continued in October in Thailand.

Director Juan Antonio Bayona decided not to specify the
nationalities of the main characters in order to create a universal film
 in which nationalities were irrelevant to the plot.

The tsunami was recreated with a mixture of digital effects and
real water surges filmed in slow motion created in a water tank in Spain
 using miniatures that were destroyed by a huge wave. Bayona committed
to working with real water rather than a computer-generated wave because
 he wanted the story to be authentic. This meant Watts and Holland spent
 five weeks filming physically and psychologically demanding scenes in a
 massive water tank.
 Holland, aged 14 at the time of filming, later described it as a "scary
 environment...You can imagine how tiring and brutal that was."

*The Impossible* is the second collaboration between Naomi Watts and Ewan McGregor after appearing together in the 2005 film *Stay*. It is also Hayden Styles first time acting in a feature film.

## Release

Warner Bros. released the film in Spain on 11 October 2012. The United States distribution rights were pre-bought by Summit Entertainment. A teaser trailer was released on 26 December 2011.
 After a full-length English language trailer was released on 20 August
2012, a United States release date of 21 December 2012 was confirmed by
Summit.
 It was released on 11 October 2012 in Spain and in Ireland and the
United Kingdom on 1 January 2013. The film was released in the US on 4
January 2013 and was made available by Summit Entertainment through a
website streaming the film to members of SAG-AFTRA for consideration of
the SAG awards.

It was released on DVD/Blu-ray in the US and Canada on Tuesday, 23 April 2013, with a European release 13 May 2013.

## Reception

### **Critical response**

Review aggregation website Rotten Tomatoes
 gave the film an approval rating of 81% based on 188 reviews, with an
average rating of 7.3/10. The site's critical consensus reads, "The
screenplay isn't quite as powerful as the direction or the acting, but
with such an astonishing real-life story at its center, *The Impossible* is never less than compelling." At Metacritic,
 which assigns a weighted mean rating to reviews, the film had an
average score of 73 out of 100, based on 42 critics, indicating
"generally favourable reviews."

Roger Ebert of the *Chicago Sun-Times*
 gave a perfect four-star rating, praising the performances of Watts and
 McGregor, and the direction of Bayona. He called it "one of the best
films of the year".

Deborah Young of *The Hollywood Reporter*
 gave a very positive review, praising the performances of the two
leading stars, stating that "Watts packs a huge charge of emotion as the
 battered, ever-weakening Maria whose tears of pain and fear never
appear fake or idealised. McGregor, cut and streaked with excessive
blood he seems too distraught to wash away, keeps the tension
razor-sharp as he pursues his family in a vast, shattered landscape."
About the film she added, "*The Impossible* is one of the most
emotionally realistic disaster movies in recent memory – and certainly
one of the most frightening in its epic re-creation of the catastrophic
2004 Indian Ocean tsunami."

Justin Chang of *Variety*
 magazine gave a positive review, praising Bayona's directing and
Sánchez's writing: "Collaborating again after their impressive 2007
debut feature, *The Orphanage*,
 Bayona and Sanchez get many things right here, starting with their
decision to eschew a more panoramic view of the disaster to follow one
family's journey from start to finish." About the performances of the
main cast members he added, "Watts has few equals at conveying physical
and emotional extremes, something she again demonstrates in a mostly
bedridden role, and McGregor, in one of his better recent performances,
manages to turn a simple phone call home into a small aria of
heartbreak. Holland, in his live-action bigscreen debut, is wonderful as
 a kind, somewhat short-tempered kid who still has plenty to learn,
setting the tone for similarly heartrending turns by young Styles and
Pendergast."

Damon Wise of *The Guardian*
 gave the film four stars out of five. He also praised the performances,
 stating that "as Maria, Watts is both brave and vulnerable, and her
scenes with the young Lucas (the excellent Tom Holland) are among the
film's best, with adult and child now unexpected equals, the mother
humbled, the son rising to the challenge. McGregor, meanwhile, gives one
 of his best performances as the sad and desperate Henry, trying to play
 the hero, the provider, while knowing his cause is almost certainly
lost." About the film, he added: "Part of the appeal of this affecting
and powerful drama is that it puts the viewer right in the moment at
every stage, using authentic locations and tsunami survivors to hammer
home the reality of this tragedy."

Eric Kohn of *IndieWire*
 gave the film a "B-" grade and stated that the film "suffers from the
greater problem of emphasising a feel-good plot within the context of
mass destruction."

According to *The New York Times* reviewer A. O. Scott,
 this narrowly-defined cinematic framing of the disaster through
European and not Thai lenses represents "a troubling complacency and a
lack of compassion in *The Impossible*," a movie which he found to be "less an examination of mass destruction than the tale of a spoiled holiday."

### **Response from victims**

Simon Jenkins, a British survivor from Portsmouth, wrote to *The Guardian*, stating the film is "beautifully accurate". This was in response to critics commenting that the film is "overdramatic" and "whitewashed".
 He says of the comments, "As I must, I've never been the sort of person
 to revisit and analyse events of the past, but some of these articles
frustrated me. Had this film been purely about the tale of a western
middle class family's 'ruined' holiday then I would have agreed. For me,
 it was the exact opposite. Rather than concentrating on the 'privileged
 white visitors', the film portrayed the profound sense of community and
 unity that I experienced in Thailand, with this family at the centre of
 it. Both for my (then) 16-year-old self and the Belón family, it was
the Thai people who waded through the settled water after the first wave
 had struck to help individuals and families... The Thai people had just
 lost everything – homes, businesses, families – yet their instinct was
to help the tourists."

Support UK, a support group for survivors of the tsunami, lobbied to have the trailer screened with a warning notice beforehand. A spokesman for Odeon Cinemas stated that it had no control over the content of the BBFC-approved trailer, saying, "We can only apologise for any offence caused on this occasion."

### **Box office**

*The Impossible* was a box office success. In Spain
 the film was released on 11 October 2012, and opened in 638 cinemas,
grossing $11,569,306 on its opening weekend, ranking No. 1 with a
per-cinema average of $18,134, the highest-grossing opening weekend for a film in Spain. On its second weekend the film remained at No. 1 and grossed $9,016,065 with a per-cinema average of $14,022.
 On its third weekend it remained at No. 1 and made $5,768,184 with a
per-cinema average of $9,098. The film ended up earning $54,536,668 at
the Spanish box office and $180,274,123 worldwide, compared with its
estimated $45 million production budget.