SXSW Film Review: Seahorse

Seahorse opens with a title card acknowledging this film might press on tender places and to tread lightly, and so it does. A bicycle commute full of stubbed-toe frustrations for main character Nola offers a preview of her rough journey ahead.

Nola, played by the film’s writer and director Aisha Evelyna, is barely holding her life together. The fine dining restaurant she works in is her best friend Adelaide’s, and Adelaide’s fiancé Rob is the chef de cuisine. He’s a spectacular menace. The kind of guy who cares more about influencers than the food, and certainly more than the staff, so he sends Nola to drag floor mats to the alley, just to remind her of her place.

It’s out there that she locks eyes with a seemingly unhoused man collecting bottles from the dumpster. And just like that, her estranged father Cyrus is back.

The film doesn’t rush to explain their history, but the emotional weight is obvious, rooted in complicated origins and probably generational trauma. Fragile mental health is the current running beneath this film. Nola has had to re-parent herself, with mixed results. There’s a visual motif of a younger version of her that cuts in at moments of pain, an inner child the film keeps returning to. She takes Cyrus in anyway, makes him dinner, and gives him a place to sleep.

As past and present collide, both of them tank, separately, pulled into a riptide of unhealed wounds. Cyrus ends up in the hospital. Nola’s grief tugs her down, threatening to swallow her whole until a kind friend offers a night of escape, likely saving her life.

At its core, Seahorse is a father-daughter story, but it’s also about the way women hold each other up while men in their lives cause damage. At one point Nola tells a deeply concerned Adelaide: “You keep getting mad at me and not the game.” It’s one devastating and poignant example of how well Evelyna writes.

Ocean waves bookend the film, tied to Cyrus’ Bahamian roots. Like the tide, the Nola-Cyrus relationship returns, then recedes. Then returns again, changed. Not with ill intent, but because that’s how the ocean works. It’s a confident structural choice that supports the ending’s payoff. 

At the film’s world premiere on Friday, Evelyna explained the title: Male seahorses carry their young to term, and the hippocampus translates from Greek as seahorse, for its shape. For a film about memory, parenthood, the body carrying what the mind can’t, Seahorse earns every bit of it.

Seahorse Narrative Feature Competition, World Premiere Monday 16, 6:15pm, Alamo Lamar Wednesday 18, 3pm, Alamo Lamar Find more of The Austin Chronicle’s continuing coverage of SXSW.

The post SXSW Film Review: Seahorse appeared first on The Austin Chronicle.