One of the best horror-esque ghost story films of the previous decade was Juan Antonio Bayona's "The Orphanage," likely because it was much more than your average, spooks-in-the-attic horror, and was a rich and emotionally textured drama just as much as it was a classic ghost tale. It instantly made Bayona, a protege of Guillermo del Toro, one to watch.
But it's been five years since that 2007 picture, and in the interim Bayona has mounted the film "The Impossible," an account of a family caught, with tens of thousands of strangers, in the mayhem of one of the worst natural catastrophes of our time: the 2004 tsunami that devastated the west coast of Sumatra, Indonesia. Starring Ewan McGregor, Naomi Watts and Bayona's favorite character actor, Geraldine Chaplin, we've seen a brief teaser trailer and scattered images, but now an international trailer has arrived and it looks pretty damn good.
One of the reasons "The Impossible," shot at least two years ago, has yet to hit screens is all the myriad effects. And unlike, say, Clint Eastwood's "The Hereafter," which uses the 2004 tsunami disaster as an opening plot point, it looks like Bayona and his team have really worked to make these effects look believable. More importantly, like "The Orphanage," there appears to be a strong emotional current at play. The trailer may be in Spanish, but it does give off an unsettling affect that you can understand in any language. There's no U.S. release date for this one yet, but the film has an October 11 release date in Spain and has late fall bows set in Argentina, Brazil, the Netherlands and Belgium. 2013 we assume? Let's hope we don't have to wait too long. [via Movies.com]
