Directed by Austin Andrews and Andrew Holmes, “The Island Between the Tides” centers on mystery and intrigue as it tells a familial story brimming with grief and melancholy. The film begins with a disappearance that gets resolved with suddenness and without explanation. Lily vanishes while playing with her sister when their parents are away. Nobody can find her for days. When she reappears, she is surprised because she feels it has only been a few hours since she left for hiking.
The film rapidly cuts past several years of the girls’ adolescence to adulthood. Lily marries early and has a kid. There’s a hum she hears that draws her towards the eponymous island. There is a pivotal ferry, but one whose course of direction isn’t really well specified. Based on a J.M. Barrie work, the screenplay mentions a larger geography but strategically avoids plunging too deeply into locational particulars. It is essential to keep it unclear and fuzzy and thereby maintain the aura of ambiguity.
As Lily (Paloma Kwaitkoski) wanders off, she finds herself in an unfamiliar town. There, she is confronted with a murder committed casually and publicly but not registering any protestation or shock from anyone else around her. Horrified, Lily realizes twenty years have passed. When she returns home, there’s a stranger, and her parents are missing. The man turns out to be the husband of her sister, Zinnia (Camille Sullivan).
The father now stays in a shelter for older people, the mother dead, and the son living somewhere else, who has become a recluse and an outcast. Everyone has aged except Lily. Zinnia’s husband is skeptical that it is truly Lily who has returned since the family has suffered the plight of being fooled by an imposter earlier. Zinnia and the father choose to believe, and all the doubts are snuffed as Lily shows all the cues of their shared history.
Her son, Jared ( David Mazouz), is plagued by paranoia and stays cooped up in a separate space. He is frayed by peculiar visions and feels constantly threatened under the weight of a persecution complex. Lily tries to connect with Jared, but the latter keeps rejecting the former. The mother and son never get the time to bond. Forced into an undesirable point of connection, they have to learn to speak to each other in a new language of love and care. Lily teaches him to trust her and have faith in her.
That she has had experiences reverberating with his becomes their bridge. Both are otherwise isolated in their strange experiences where they have often trespassed temporality. There are touching moments between the mother and son that establish the film’s beating heart. However, Kwaitkoski’s permanently cry-ready expression dilutes the emotional complexity of the relationship, never allowing its rough edges and the period of absence to inform each other.
There are layers of reality and unreality in the film. It’s an ambitious, albeit tired idea that the film struggles to expand into startling, unpredictable territory. A later dramatic revelation lacks the gut punch because we can see it a mile away. The jolt of tension, the gushing upheaval of tragedy, and a sense of time that’s elapsed and lost- these are elements critical to the film’s texture. Nevertheless, all are remiss in the way the film evokes them.
This is a shame because the narrative is filled with promise. But the film cleaves through a maze of realities in a manner that elides their dimensions of impact on the characters’ emotional circumstances. Overall, “The Island Between The Tides” excises a carefully considered temporal journey and piles the sentimentality a tad too much; a miscalculation of the two’s proportions reduces the film’s heft.
![The Levelling [2017]: An Internal rage and grief tripping in silence](http://www.highonfilms.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/The-Levelling-highonfilms-768x403.jpg)
![How to Sell Drugs Online (Fast) Netflix Original TV Series [2019] Review](http://www.highonfilms.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/How-to-Sell-Drugs-Online-Fast-Netflix-high-on-films-768x378.jpg)