The Big Picture

Seagrass
is an emotionally painful yet revealing journey for a family on a retreat.
The film infuses familiar elements with horror, leaving a hauntingly beautiful impression.
Ally Maki’s performance as Judith anchors the film, revealing tragic family dynamics through turmoil.

There is a certain type of movie that will either make you want to call your dad or strangle him. Precise in detail when it comes to both character and theme, writer-director Meredith Hama-Brown’s Seagrass is one such film. This may sound harsh, but it is the best descriptor of what is an emotionally painful yet revealing journey for a family that goes on a retreat hoping for healing. It is a gentle ghost story of sorts about the loss that comes not only from death, but the potential end of a marriage. While there are plenty of great films that have been about this subject, Seagrass is one that takes familiar elements and infuses them with something often closer to horror. It doesn’t fully leap into it as much as it falls into its oddly haunting beauty. The result is a film that leaves a distinct impression, molding deeply personal elements and sweepingly profound ideas into something spectacular that sneaks up on you.

What Is ‘Seagrass’ About?

This begins with a gentle scene of two girls playing around on a ferry in 1994. This tranquility, which captures something similar to the fragile childlike joy of something like Petite Maman, is not to last. Stephanie (Nyha Huang Breitkreuz) is the older of the two, showing a confidence that her younger sister Emmy (Remy Marthaller) doesn’t quite have. Still, they look out for each other, with the older sister keeping them both safe by holding them in place as they look over the railing. It is when they return to their parents who are sitting in the car waiting to depart once they reach shore that we begin to see that all is not well in the family. Judith, played by Ally Maki of last year’s underrated Shortcomings, is a loving mother to the two even as she carries with her immense loss both recent in the death of her mother and long-buried in the path her life has taken. Steve (Luke Robert) can play the part of the caring father when it’s easy to do so, but can slip into cruelty without warning whenever he feels insecure. When we then arrive at the destination, we discover that it is a retreat meant to be for the couple to fix their marriage. As their children are left almost entirely to their own devices, playing with other kids while there are pointedly seemingly no adults around, the film continually pulls our attention away from the story that is all playing out on this plane to something that seems to be coming from elsewhere beyond our understanding.

Specifically, this comes in the form of a cave down by the water that Emmy discovers with a group of other kids. One of them tells her that it is no ordinary place and that, if you look inside it while thinking of someone dead, they’ll begin to haunt you. As a disquieting yet understated score by composer Oscar Vargas begins to rise, we see the camera drift towards Emmy as she remains standing in place with this new information settling in. Even when we return to the tense domestic settings of dinners and putting kids to bed, the sense that there is something else there lingers. With cinematography by Norm Li, we then return to the cave as the camera begins to gently float out through the mouth and up through the woods before arriving back with Emmy. It feels almost reminiscent of something like the recent Presence while remaining much more ethereal and slippery. Indeed, the film is best when it keeps this element of the film as something less tangible and more uncertain about what it means. Seeing Judith comfort her daughter before, just moments later, looking rattled in the kitchen tells us that this is something that is increasingly having an impact on her as well.

The film then settles into being a drama about the way this family is trying to navigate the fracturing that is intertwined with these glimpses of horror. It isn’t scary and is instead more somber, with the casual callousness that starts to consume the family proving crushing. Judith, for all the ways she is trying to speak honestly about what is going on, must contend with a husband who is generally unhelpful at best and hateful at worst. He isn’t the only one, as repeatedly patronizing racism rears its ugly head from those who believe they’re being kind, but he is the one who becomes the most persistently infuriating. Judith is imperfect, human, and flawed, though she is putting in effort while he couldn’t seem to care less. Even a brief scene where she shares how her mother died recently is interrupted by him specifying precisely how long it has been. The insulting implication is as if she should somehow be over it by now. As they are told in one of their often unhelpful group couples counseling sessions, “a marriage is a fragile ecosystem.” While a little blunt, it effectively ties the tumultuous emotions that are troubling the family to the way something else seems to be coming from the natural world around them. While not some sort of more exploratory work of slow cinema by any means, the way it pulls away into the less easily defined is where it is most potent.

Ally Maki Is Magnificent in ‘Seagrass’
Image via Game Theory Films

Through all of this, the film is populated with great performances across the board. While the youth performances are each some of the best of recent memory, it is Maki who remains the grounding force to it all. From the moments where we can see Judith reflecting on the way things are crumbling around her to the ones where all of her emotions come bursting out, it is a beautifully balanced performance that finds new layers with each moment. One brief conversation where she talks about her past and how she feels she has been “programmed not to think about certain things” is where we start to feel everything come into focus.

We can hear the regrets that Judith has in the gentle disappointment of her tone just as we feel the aspirations she has for something different for herself and the future she can still have. Even as the film takes a significant shift near the end that it almost loses a handle on, it is Maki who continually holds it together. That it is her character who has had to do so even as her own life has come apart is where it finds its most tragic revelations. In the end, when all has been broken open, the most horrifying parts of our lives can stem from the everyday pains that come from within the family rather than what comes rushing in from the outside.

Seagrass REVIEWSeagrass is an intriguing feature debut from writer-director Meredith Hama-Brown with a magnificent performance from Ally Maki.ProsThe film is precise in detail as it explores its troubled characters just as something lurks around them that they can’t understand.The score and cinematography each help to instill the experience with something approaching horror.Ally Maki is able to express layers of emotion and history, holding together the unfolding story. ConsThe film undertakes a significant shift near the end that it almost loses a handle on.

Seagrass is in theaters in the U.S. now. Click below for showtimes.

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