Watched Tideland with Ryan and Eva last night. A strange journey following a little girl, Jeliza Rose, and her exploration of life, it left me with an unclean feeling, as if we had been witness to a curse. Do not mistake me, the film was excellent, but it worked very hard at making the audience uncomfortable. It whispered of things better left unsaid, the modern abuses of very old stories, of bad things that inevitably happen to the best of good girls and the sad hidden loves buried within the wicked witch of the west. It was very counter-intuitive, though it made perfect sense, (even through the scenes of magic realism), much like watching someone remove a cork that’s fallen into a bottle by inflating a plastic bag. I found myself desperately wanting certain things to not be fact, to have them exist only in the wonderful mythical architecture of Jeliza Rose’s imagination, though knowing, finally, that the true enemy, if there was one, was only the psychotic banality of life.
I’m not sure if I recommend it, only that you should not let young children see it. As a double-feature with Pan’s Labyrinth, it might cause nightmares, insects crawling under skin, (the classic of the gentleman junkie, wrapped in a red stolen cloak, high on life and wetly muttering dirty stories into a gutter awash with dark fairy-tale glitz). However, everyone should have their kids watch this.