TIFF Review: “Seagrass”

The long toots of the ferry horn have a lilting, almost musical sound, one that emphasizes the playful mood of the two little girls running around the boat deck. There’s not a cloud in the sky. The calm blue water seems to stretch into infinity. The girls pester their dad for a dollar for some ice cream, and he gives in to them good-naturedly. Their final destination is an idyllic island retreat that sits right on the ocean. At first glance, this appears to be a happy family of four on vacation: dad Steve (Luke Roberts), mom Judith (Ally Maki), older daughter Stephanie (Nyha Breitkreuz), and youngest Emmy (Remy Marthaller). But something isn’t quite right. Judith appears distant on the journey over, verging on irritable as she pushes back against Steve’s acquiescence to their daughters’ pleas for dessert, and later doesn’t participate in their cheerful singing. After they are shown to their cabin, we next see Judith and Steve in a group meeting with several other couples. We know without needing to be told that this is a couple’s therapy retreat, and from their mildly evasive responses to the counselor’s questions that Steve is happy with their relationship as it is, while for Judith, things haven’t felt quite right, particularly after her mother passed away five months earlier.

Director Meredith Hama-Brown drew on her own experiences for her feature film debut, Seagrass, which had its world premiere in the Discoveries section of the 2023 Toronto International Film Festival. As much as Seagrass deals with familial instability and questions surrounding marriage and motherhood (things that Hama-Brown experienced as a six-year-old witnessing her own parents’ divorce), it’s equally as concerned with racial identity. Judith, like Hama-Brown, is Japanese-Canadian; born in North America, married to a white Canadian man, having never visited Asia herself, she experiences the diaspora that so many children of immigrants face, exacerbated by the passing of her mom, who we are to assume was her last close link to her Japanese heritage (Judith makes sure to ask Steve if he packed a blanket her mother made for her).

This aspect of Seagrass and the personal nature of it is clearly conveyed through Hama-Brown’s script and Maki’s impressively soulful performance. At times, the discussions surrounding race in the film are rather blunt; Stephanie is told by a mean girl peer she befriends at the on-site kids camp that despite being half-Japanese she looks “normal,” while Carol (Sarah Gadon), the perky wife of Pat (Chris Pang) and a frequent attendee of the retreat, compliments Judith on her children’s “exotic” look. And yet, they are no less piercing, particularly in Stephanie and Judith’s resigned reactions: they laugh it off or talk around it, the former confronting the unintentional harm of a child’s words, the latter dealing with the built-in racism of a woman who ought to know better (especially being the wife of an Asian man herself). Again, Maki is sensational, specifically in how she lets the viewer see and hear through her face and voice her character’s burgeoning regret and discontent. When she’s questioned first by Pat and later by her daughters regarding her heritage, her lack of knowledge about her family history (she doesn’t know, for instance, where her parents and grandparents were interred during World War II) is a clear sticking point and source of sadness. I’m not a member of a marginalized group, but I frequently feel like I don’t know as much about my family as I ought to, and that uncertainty as it is navigated in Seagrass feels recognizable and authentic.

Seagrass does, however, exhibit somewhat of an uneven focus that causes its pacing to waver, most noticeably in the third act. Judith is decidedly the film’s primary character; we spend the most time with her, and become thoroughly familiar with her fraught mental state. Judith’s time at the retreat seems to cause more issues than it solves. She begins questioning not only her identity and her marriage, which she appears hell-bent on setting right without fully knowing where it went wrong in the first place— comparing her and Steve with the seemingly well-adjusted Pat and Carol— but also whether or not she is a good mother, the seeds of doubt planted in her mind by Carol’s assured proclamations that she doesn’t want kids. “I’m sure I’d love them,” she says. “But would I have regrets?”

But Seagrass also divides its time between Stephanie and Emmy, and while we watch Stephanie, on the verge of puberty, trying to fit in with kids her age while acting out with adults in the usual teen girl way while already confronting similar identity questions that her mother is, the tone is quite different in the scenes that center on Emmy. She becomes convinced that a cave on the beach she visits with some of the other kids is haunted, and that therefore the ghost of her dead grandmother is watching over the family, and that tense mood akin to a horror movie follows her for the rest of the film. Even a stretch of the film towards the end that finds her in their cabin, alone, sees the camera rotating into canted high angles, while the music and soundscape becomes decidedly eerier in step with the off-kilter visuals. It’s all a reflection of the instability trickling down from the parents to the kids— Hama-Brown and cinematographer Norm Li even shot the kids handheld versus the static camera that’s prevalent with the adults to accentuate the difference— but it’s too drawn-out and meandering to be wholly effective.

Still, Seagrass is an impressive debut feature, not only due to Hama-Brown’s incisive layering of themes baked into her script and characters, but in her ability to create a tangible mood and sense of place. Shot on 35 mm, Seagrass possesses a subtly nostalgic look and feel that also comes through in the costuming and production design (the film is set in the early-mid 1990s, though there are few other indications of that to be found). The bright and sunny poolside is contrasted with the dark, cavernous rock formations around the beach, and the perpetually shadowy interior of the cabin the family-in-crisis inhabits. Seagrass sidesteps cliches that may have dragged it down (there’s an attraction of a sort between Judith and Pat, but it thankfully never amounts to anything), and doesn’t attempt to give its characters a tidy happy ending. It’s a lovely, personal story from a voice who clearly has a lot to say, and knows how best to say it.

Seagrass had its world premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival on September 8. For information on additional TIFF screenings, click here. Runtime: 115 minutes.