Fantaspoa 2024 Review: THE ISLAND BETWEEN TIDES, Supernatural Mind-Teaser About Time, Ghosts and Complicated Relationships

When Lily (Remy Marthaller) was a child, she followed a mysterious melody and wandered onto a tidal island, disappearing for several days – though, when she returned, she claimed she was actually gone for mere minutes.

Sixteen years later, it’s 1998, and Lily (now played by Paloma Kwiatkowski) is a young mother. The incident from years ago has become a sort of a family legend that Lily’s older sister Zinnia (Camille Sullivan) tells her about.

But Lily is still haunted by it and decides to return to the island. When she comes back to the mainland after what feels like a few hours, she finds herself in a strange world where her family can no longer be found at their home, and people at the bar are confused when she asks for a phone book because everything is online these days. It’s 2024, and things get even stranger and more complicated when Lily does manage to get in touch with her family that’s been falling apart since her latest disappearance.

The Island Between Tides, screened as part of Fantaspoa 2024 programming, is loosely based on J.M. Barrie’s play Mary Rose, which was first produced in 1920; its long path to a screen adaptation deserves its own tale. This much gloomier Gothic version of Peter Pan intrigued Alfred Hitchcock so much that in the 1960s he intended to make a film with Tippi Hedren out of it; and in the early 2000s it was Hedren’s daughter Melanie Griffith who acquired the rights to the story again. Both movies didn’t happen, and now the original plot is reimagined as a supernatural drama written and directed by Austin Andrews and Andrew Holmes.

Barrie’s play was about a girl who disappears once in her childhood, and then again in her adulthood; when she comes back this time, several decades have passed, and her son is now older than her. The Island Between Tides follows the premise but adds even more layers, while still keeping the focus on the relationship between Lily and her grownup troubled son (David Mazouz – Gotham’s Bruce Wayne). It's probably worth mentioning that for all its complexity, the film is kind of on a slow side, meaning, that the audience generally arrives at certain conclusions before the characters do.

Holmes’ and Andrews’ film is doomed to be talked about in regards to its mind bending plot, but its aesthetics is what really makes the movie stick in one’s, well, mind. Obviously, the music is instrumental here, and Keith Power’s score that is both alluring and haunting, and actually refences the original one by Norman O'Neill, written for Barrie’s play staging.

The cinematography by Dany Lavoie also creates its own kind of narrative and once again emphasizes the central idea about the duality of things. The camera seems to be imitating the titular tides, easily juxtaposing darkness and light, the delusive beauty of nature and the danger that looms within.

While The Island Between Tides evokes the memory of many films with similar topics, the closest reference seems to be Peter Weir’s magnificent Picnic at Hanging Rock, where a group of young women one day simply dissolved into the misty air amongst the mountains. The film penned by Andrews and Holmes isn't only about the illusive nature of time, which is far from linear and either exists all at once or doesn’t really exist at all.

This is also a tale about memory, mental illness, and fractured families, as well as the fragility and perseverance of love. It is deeply ironic that back when Hitchcock attempted to adapt this story, the studio believed that ghosts and damaged familial relations were two things that didn’t mash up well. As evidenced by, not only The Island Between Tides, but by pretty much all contemporary supernatural films and TV-shows, every ghost story is also a story about a complicated family.

The film enjoyed its Latin American premiere at Fantaspoa.