The Son and the Sea: A Naturalistic and Tender Vision of Self-Discovery in the Face of Death

There’s a famous painting by Henry Fuseli called The Nightmare. It depicts a sleeping woman dressed in white, her limbs extended, with a small creature sitting on her chest. The monster faces us, its clear white eyes mirrored by the horrified expression of an undead horse in the background. It’s a painting infused with suffocating eroticism and strangled uncertainty as it depicts a state of being between life and death, waking and sleeping.

It’s a painting that inspires, intentionally or not, the feeling of grief: the way that death can trap you between states of being. The monster weighs on the chest, choking the lungs and slowing the heart. Fuseli evokes the unseen; a horrific representation of the tumultuous waters crashing within our sub- and unconscious lives. The stillness of the painting, the unwavering gaze of the incubus, does little to assuage the violence lying just below the surface. Even in our waking life the monster, rendered invisible or symbolic, still suffocates.

At this year’s edition of TIFF, grief felt inescapable. It seemed to be the subject of nearly every other film screened at the festival, from some of the biggest blockbuster hits like Frankenstein and Hamnet, to the sometimes forgotten corners of the Discovery section in films like Forastera, Mārama, Julian, and The Man in My Basement.

Among them, The Son and the Sea represents a fascinating departure on common themes. An unusually confident feature debut that avoids easy clichés and embraces a frank naturalism, the film follows Jonah (Jonah West, director Stroma Cairns’s brother) as he travels to the Northeast coast of Scotland with his best friend Lee (Stanley Brock).

The Son and the Sea opens with Jonah waking up in his messy apartment. He makes a list of everything wrong with his life (basically everything) and undertakes a penny-pinching journey to stay in the home of his great aunt, who has been moved to an assisted living facility. Jonah and Lee meet Charlie (Connor Tompkins), a young deaf man, and get twisted into the trials and tribulations of small-time life on the coast: criminality, drinking, laughter, and despair. It’s a film with many narrative and character threads, most of which remain unresolved. Rather than being frustrating, however, the screenplay seems to vibrate with authenticity. It’s a film about a life unfinished, a mourning and transformation still in process. Closure would feel too clean and untrue to the experiences it depicts.

Ruben Woodin Dechamps’s painterly cinematography renders the earthy browns and ochres of the landscape through the steel-hues of the overcast sky into an environment that feels cut off from the rest of the world. While this area of Scotland seems economically depressed, there’s a sense of almost fantastic disconnect that renders the space almost mystical. As waves crash not just against the shore but quite literally against the sea-facing homes, we enter a mindspace marked by outward stagnancy and inner violence. There’s an unmistakable sensuality to the images, which feel both documentary and romantic, as they capture the dangerous beauty of a landscape that reflects the inner tumult of its characters. More than merely symbolic, the rendering of the natural world depicts its amoral nature; it’s a force that remains beyond human control.

The film’s underlying themes of grief and escape are not hammered on the audience’s head. It takes us a beat to understand that Jonah’s quest to this small town is not just running away from the death of his father, but running towards the inevitable death of another loved one. We slowly understand, through the unraveling of the story and clues, that Jonah’s great aunt helped raise him: she was a pivotal force in the shaping of his life and values. She’s still alive, but her dementia leaves her disoriented and forgetful. If tenderness means a softness that showcases physical or spiritual vulnerability, Jonah’s spirit feels bruised, as he also grieves someone not yet lost. For the living, death can rob us of more than just a physical presence, but also of a spiritual and moral grounding.

Jonah finds himself trapped between those two worlds; the living and the dead. His need to uproot his life is born out of a paradoxical need to self-destruct and self-improve. As grief remains something so interior, it’s only normal that it is often accompanied by a self-immolating impulse. We want the world to understand the pain we’re in, so we act out; Jonah runs away, he does stupid things. As viewers we understood too that Jonah’s guilt is mounting as he reckons with the fragility but also uncertainty of unconditional love. He doesn’t feel as though he’s worthy of that grace; so he fights it.

The film’s naturalistic performances undercut any potential clichés of this outcome. The characters feel real and embodied, the line between fiction and nonfiction blurred. The Son and the Sea resonates with rhythms that feel born from Mike Leigh and Ken Loach, traditions of specificity and eccentricity that don’t feel rehearsed as much as they are lived. We aren’t spoonfed histories or relationships, we ascertain them through gestures and references. It’s not a film that explains or resolves, but feels deeply rooted in observation and feeling.

While grief feels violent and specific, it’s also terribly mundane. It’s something we will all inevitably experience. While many films at this year’s TIFF offer a view of grief anchored in catharsis, The Son and the Sea offers an alternate view on the subject; one rooted in exploration. The film doesn’t see grief as something to be conquered, but rather something to live with. In a movie devoid of acts of mourning, the process of the filmmaking itself feels almost ritualistic in its approach to paying homage to ones loved and lost. Its open-endedness allows for the pain of grief to live on like the waves that continue to crash into the shore, a beautiful pendulum of force, pain, humility, and grace.

Justine Smith
©FIPRESCI 2025