On a rocky island, a small, tight-knit community leads a self-sufficient life as harsh as the surrounding soil. Here and there, houses stand facing the wind and the ocean, scattered like the vegetation. Once abundant, fishing is now barely enough to feed the last resistance fighters.
Then, one day, like a biblical story, a baby is rescued from a stranded boat. Bobby and Grace, a childless couple, adopt the little girl, whom they name Isla. Endowed with powers that enchant the population, Isla will find herself, despite herself, after ten blessed years, at the heart of a disastrous conflict.
An intriguing, if frustrating, religious allegory, The King Tide (The big tide) arrives, draped in disturbing mystery and austere poetry.
Matter of power
The film simply and effectively shows how Bobby (Clayne Crawford), Grace (Lara Jean Chorostecki), and Grace’s mother, Faye (Frances Fisher), became the island’s most important citizens because They control access to Isla (Alix West Lefler) and her healing gifts. As in most organized religions, it’s all about power: who has it, who wants it, to what extent, for what purposes, etc.
Behind the apparent happiness linked, among other things, to the miraculous fishing that Isla generates, the population is more divided than it seems. This is especially true when it comes to Beau (Aden Young), a doctor whose practice Isla has made obsolete.
One day, tragedy strikes and Isla can’t change anything. This event acts as a catalyst, or rather, a revealing agent. This is particularly true of Faye, whose apparent altruism actually conceals a terrifying fanaticism.
And all of this is intriguing and interesting, but intermittently, in waves.
Living pictures
Indeed, as soon as the screenplay written by no less than four people (Albert Shin, William Woods, Kevin Coughlin, Ryan Grassby) abandons everything relating to the notion of a belief system – its development, its power dynamics, what motivates people to adhere to it or to change it – the story as such becomes a bit ordinary.
Secrets come to light, but at least we never try to turn the reason for voluntary isolation from the community into a big bogus revelation at the The Village (The village), by M. Night Shyamalan.
Ultimately, The King Tide constitutes a good case of a film where the form not only eclipses the substance, but transcends it. Influenced, as he told us in an interview, by the style of the American painter Andrew Wyeth (Terrence Malick’s inspiration for Days of Heaven / The harvests of heaven), as well as taking as reference certain works of his own father, the Newfoundland painter Ian Sparkes, Christian Sparkes composes a succession of living paintings of a beauty that is sometimes idyllic, sometimes sinister. Visually, it is truly splendid.
The performers are also very inhabited, especially the always excellent Frances Fisher (Titanic, Reptile), chilling as a matriarch capable of the worst in the name of the idea she has of good.
In this, the film reminds us how humans have no equal when it comes to lying and perverting, and thus transforming into a scourge what initially looked like a divine gift.