Mar Adentro (The Sea Inside)

I dreaded seeing Alejandro Amenábar’s new film, The Sea Inside, about the Spanish quadriplegic Ramón Sampedro who became an international cause célèbre for the assisted suicide movement. Besides my aversion to death and dying as subject matter, there was Amenábar’s stylish yet empty track record to consider: the repulsive Abre Los Ojos and the half-baked The Others. Yet my fears of slow torture were unfounded. The Sea Inside marks a tremendous leap forward for Amenábar as a director to watch.

“Now imagine a movie screen opening up before you,” the voice of an unseen woman guides us at the very beginning of the film, and out of an unfocused haze emerges that screen within the screen, which gradually encompasses the larger frame, one filled with fantasy images of a pristine, sunny beach, an isolated oasis of bottle-green waves washing the shore, as the woman’s voice continues, “the sensation of peace is infinite.”