Showing from Feb. 8: The Impossible ****

Stars: Naomi Watts, Ewan McGregor, Tom Holland.
Director: Taylor Hackford.
Rated: R
Showing: Liberty Theatre. Fri-Sat 2.30pm, 6pm; Sun 1.30pm, 4pm; Mon-Wed 2.30pm, 6pm.
Runtime: 114 minutes
Drama, thriller.

So terrifying is the 2004 tsunami as imagined in The Impossible, its destructive force engulfing the screen with such violent menace, that the imagery alone elicits a rising dread so intense you may feel yourself gasping for breath.

Spanish-born director J.A. Bayona must have been tempted to let the monstrous waves triggered by the Indian Ocean earthquake that devastated South East Asia and left hundreds of thousands dead overwhelm the dramatic story he tells.

That never happens in this profoundly moving film inspired by the real-life experience of the Alvarez Belon family on that fateful December day.

Naomi Watts and Ewan McGregor star as Maria and Henry, on holiday with their three boys at a Thailand beach resort, and the film introduces gifted young Tom Holland as the couple’s oldest son Lucas.

Bayona achieves a rare sense of balance between the big and the powerful as well as the small and the intimate in the family’s survival against impossible odds, no doubt the inspiration for the title.

Their situation was heartbreaking, their courage 
in the face of it humbling. It is the kind of ode to 
the human spirit that you hope comes along, and not just during the holiday season.

In a handful of scenes, the director lays the framework for the way in which he will use sight and sound to define their experience.

The deafening roar of the jet engines, the glassy ocean underneath it, the eerie silence that thickens in the moments before the tsunami hits, and the muffled screams of Maria when it does, are beyond even what Bayona achieved in his petrifying Cannes Film Festival debut a few years ago — The Orphanage.

As is always the case in disasters like these, the road to help is paved by the care and generosity of strangers, and the movie is filled with the many small acts of kindness extended to the family along the way. The villagers who rip off a door to carry Maria, the man who lends Henry his cellphone despite the precious minutes of battery life he will lose.