The Glimmer of the Sea Movie Review
The Glimmer of the Sea (2023) ‘Berlinale’ Review: In one of my favorite books about grief, Grief Is a Feathered Thing by Max Porter, the author imagines that grief takes the form of a raven. The intensity of the loss translates into the raven’s frantic speech and the father and sons hovering over the mother as she broods over her loss.
Domien Huyghe’s Zeevonk (Sparkle of the Sea) deals with the same idea of loss and manages to create an adventure out of this feeling for a teenager who recently lost his father at sea. The film is carefully crafted and is heartbreaking at the end.
In the opening scene, young Lena is in her father’s arms, and they are both waiting to see the blue stars after night falls on the seashore in Ostend, Belgium. Lena admits that she’s afraid of wolves, and her father tells her that with her, wolves have no chance of getting close to Lena.
Currently, Lena (played by Saar Rogiers) is a teenager and training to become a sailor. We see him partying with his friends and family on the town until his father dies in a shipwreck that night. Lena is distraught with grief, but she refuses to believe that the shipwreck could be her father’s fault. He quickly begins to imagine that there may be a sea monster or some new creature in the water that could have caused this accident.
No one believes his theory, so he must go on an adventure to prove the truth. Does Lena finally find the monster in the sea? Huyghe’s film draws inspiration from his personal life to reimagine the heart-wrenching grief, his various coping mechanisms among people, and his refusal to surrender to the idea of loss.
What I love most about Lena’s sea monster theory is how likely it is to be true. It is a proven fact that due to global warming, water temperatures are rising and aquatic animals are starting to leave their natural habitats to find water where they can live again. Lena and her friends are aware of this global environmental change.
The plausibility of this theory helps keep the audience focused on the actual discovery of the alien sea creature, while also knowing full well that the monster could be a figment of Lena’s sad imagination. In one scene, as we saw her father do in the first scenes, Lena’s grief turns to anger as she kicks the waters of the sea.
In another, she channels her anger toward her mother, believing her father’s actions caused her own death. Rogiers is a talented artist and I hope to see him star in similar challenging roles in the future. She brings Lena’s mood to life with careful perfection.
However, what doesn’t escape me is that Lena is barely allowed to watch the people around her trying to cope with the same tragedy, since her father was one of the three fishermen who died in the incident. . Her best friend seems intent on bringing up her father and the memories surrounding him, and Lena’s brother tries to make a rap song in memory of her father, but stumbles into singing it in full in front of an audience, but the film doesn’t have room to explore. parallel to their grief.
Film Narrative
The film’s narrative never goes beyond personal loss to evoke how the fishing community treats him, especially when such accidents at sea must be commonplace in their shared history.
These colors reflect the sunny and bright shades of happiness that we see before the accident. He constructs sadness as a terrible emotion that drains the joys and colors from life. The film’s coastal scenery and the great blackness of the sea at night contribute to the fear of the unknown.
The latter can also be read as the unknown realm of death, located at the edge of life, where Lena’s father left but never returned. Rarely have I felt such a sense of loss at the cinema as I did watching Sea Sparkle.