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The Sea

✭ ✭ ✭   Read critic reviews

Ireland, United Kingdom · 2013
1h 26m
Director Stephen Brown
Starring Ciarán Hinds, Charlotte Rampling, Rufus Sewell, Natascha McElhone
Genre Drama

To find peace following his wife's death, a grieving man returns to the small Irish town by the sea where he spent his childhood summers. Reminders of his past provoke a cathartic reflection, as the present draws out powerful memories from one fateful summer years ago.

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What are critics saying?

60

Total Film by

It’s impossible to escape the sense that Banville’s work is best experienced on paper.

60

Time Out London by Cath Clarke

The film can’t match the novel’s elegant, startlingly excellent Booker-Prize-winning writing, but a first-class cast (including Charlotte Rampling and Sinéad Cusack) make this an absorbing watch.

60

The Hollywood Reporter by Deborah Young

Despite its careful control of tone and a raging central performance by Ciaran Hinds, which is actually sufficient reason to see the film, this story of a man who plunges into childhood memories in the aftermath of his wife’s death remains admirable but wingless.

70

Variety by Guy Lodge

[A] good, middlebrow adaptation — which, despite being scripted by Banville himself, sacrifices much of the novel’s structural intricacy for Masterpiece-style emotional accessibility.

40

The Guardian by Mike McCahill

Hinds is a strong, wounded presence, but the laboured structure cuts insistently around him to get at a psychology mostly scrambled in translation. This Sea's just too choppy.

50

Los Angeles Times by Sheri Linden

Though handsomely photographed and featuring a compelling cast, the Ireland-set memory piece — adapted by John Banville from his Man Booker Prize-winning novel — will leave audiences wondering how much more satisfying the muted drama might be on the page.

60

The Telegraph by Tim Robey

What’s impressionistic on the page has to be re-sculpted and honed to a point on screen, but the result is that the novel’s tenderly hidden secrets become rather blatant twists.

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