Movie Review: 'The Almond and the Seahorse'

The Almond and the Seahorse (2022)

Directed by Celyn Jones, Tom Stern

Written by Celyn Jones, Kaite O'Reilly

Starring Rebel Wilson, Charlotte Gainsbourg, Celyn Jones, Tryne Dyrholm

Release Date December 16th, 2022

Published December 15th, 2022

The Almond and the Seahorse stars Rebel Wilson in a rare dramatic role. Wilson is Sarah, an archaeologist who is married to Joe (Celyn), a gregarious house husband. At least, that's what you assume if you don't know what The Almond and the Seahorse is really about. You see, Joe isn't merely unemployed, he's not staying home by choice. Joe had a brain tumor that has caused irreparable damage to his memory which slips away more and more as each day passes.

Sarah has tried to care for Joe using medication and list-making, and tapes that remind him of who he is and why he can't leave home or what might happen if he left home unsupervised. Eventually however, Sarah will be forced to admit that she can no longer care for Joe on her own. Joe is going to have to go to a facility that can care for him as his memory continues to deteriorate. Sarah thus is dealing with losing Joe both emotionally and physically as he forgets who she is and is no longer under her care.

Running concurrent to Sarah and Joe's story is that of Toni (Charlotte Gainsbourg) and Gwen (Tryne Dyrholm), a long term couple who have lived with Gwen's traumatic brain injury from a car accident for more than 15 years. Recently, Gwen has begun to no longer recognize Toni who has begun to show her age. For Gwen, she's not left the day of their accident and thus Toni has slowly become a stranger to her as she no longer recognizes her as her wife.

Like Joe, Gwen has reached a point in her growing memory loss that she can no longer live at home. She's become a danger to herself who wakes up in the morning thinking a stranger is in her bed. Gwen and Joe will each be living at a hospital facility overseen by Dr. Falmer (Meera Syal), a loving and thoughtful woman who does nearly as much to help Sarah and Toni as she does for Joe and Gwen. The people left behind in the wake of those losing their memories are suffering nearly as much and need nearly as much care.

The title, The Almond and the Seahorse, is a reference to the shapes that make up the parts of the brain that retain memory. Beyond that, the title reflects the strange and jarring storytelling, seemingly disconnected moments that seem like reality but have an uncanny quality because one person in the scene sees reality a little differently than another character. Joe, for one, thinks Sarah is the one who is having delusions and acting strangely. He doesn't remember his tumor or recognize that he's changed in any way since the tumor was removed.

Gwen, more frighteningly, wakes up each morning screaming for her wife and unable to recognize that Toni is standing in front of her. Imagine what that must be like, waking in fear every morning and taking most of the day to recover from that. Each day becomes more of a struggle for Toni to reach her wife, calm her, soothe her, and then losing her all over again by the end of the day. It's heartbreaking to imagine and Charlotte Gainsbourg and Tryne Dyrholm bring that heartbreak to devastating light at times in The Almond and the Seahorse.

If the film isn't fully successful it's because there is a rather rote quality to the drama. A sort of surface level presentation of the material that limits your emotional involvement. So much of the film is obsessed with the upturning of day to day routine for these two couples that the film fails to build out beyond the surface to illustrate the full breadth of what has been lost here. We empathize with these characters but only on a basic level. Our empathy is limited by not getting to know these characters as the movie focuses the showier parts of their story, the dramatic loss of memory and the bigger emotional displays that come with that.

There is a focus, unfortunately, in The Almond and the Seahorse, on the more showy, actorly aspects of memory loss in these movie characters. Celyn Jones especially, in his role in front of and behind the camera, favors Joe's broader expressions of his memory loss. We get little grounding in who Joe was and what we are left with is the struggle as expressed in the broad enacting of trauma and the growing emptiness behind Joe's eyes. Jones is a fine actor but, I needed more than his big performance to connect me to this character beyond a basic sense of empathy.

As for Rebel Wilson, in her first major dramatic leading role, she's overmatched here. Stripped of her sense of humor, Wilson seems not to know what to do with herself in any given scene. I'm thinking specifically of a scene in a library where she's left the ringer on her phone on and it continuously interrupts the quiet of the library. The scene is pointless, it has no purpose. It's the kind of scene in any other Rebel Wilson movie where she would do some kind of bit, a physical or verbal gag. Since however, this is a drama and not a Pitch Perfect movie, Wilson is left to being awkwardly apologetic. Why did this scene exist?

That kind of thing happens again in an important scene where Sarah and Toni meet and they offer each other comfort. Where Rebel Wilson, comedic actor, would do a comic riff, here, she's left to simply be awkward and apologetic and the scene falls flat in search of a greater purpose in presentation. This is a pivotal scene in The Almond and the Seahorse, it's the first uniting of these two story threads, and it comes off flat and almost unnecessary.

The Almond and the Seahorse ultimately plays as flat and unnecessary as a whole. The presentation of the drama never gains any momentum or insight. It's a rather by the numbers approach to drama that leans too heavily on big dramatic acting moments and too little on the details that might have bonded us to these characters beyond the kind of empathy you'd offer to any stranger going through a large tragedy. The melodrama of The Almond and the Seahorse plays like reading a GoFundMe plea for help versus actually knowing and caring for someone who is right in front of you. It's a very different level of emotional involvement.

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