The Sea

Though he has written screenplays for such films as Albert Nobbs and The Last September, revered Irish author John Banville — a perennial contender for the Nobel Prize for Literature — has not had a film adapted from one of his own novels since 1984's Reflections. Which makes it that much more of an honour for the Festival to host the North American premiere of The Sea, director Stephen Brown's adaptation of Banville's beloved 2005 Man Booker Prize-winner, an immersive tale of a troubled past engulfing the present.

Max Morden (Ciarán Hinds) is a retired art historian attempting to write a book about French painter Pierre Bonnard. Unable to cope with the recent death of his wife, Max retires to the seaside cottage where he spent a fateful childhood summer with the affluent Cedars family, whose matriarch he quietly pined for — and whose children possessed a troubling secret. When Max returns to the cottage the Cedars have long since vacated, he finds the estate is now looked after by Miss Vavasour (Charlotte Rampling). She witnesses Max's alcoholic descent into a private abyss, as he is haunted by unbearable losses that demand to be reckoned with.

Employing rapturous images of waves — images reminiscent of Bonnard's paintings — to sweep us back and forth in time, The Sea alternately roils with fleeting idyll and growing menace. There are intimations of trauma lurking in Max's past. We never lose our place in Brown's intricate temporal weave, or in the emotional layers conveyed by Hinds, whose pinched mouth and furtive eyes exude a secret ocean of memories. Here, in one of his most compelling roles, this elegantly contained and controlled actor keeps us transfixed — and keeps us guessing until the film's dark yet cathartic revelations.

MICHÈLE MAHEUX