A decade ago, actors Aden Young and Clayne Crawford were pivotal parts of the much-underrated Sundance channel drama series Rectify. The show had a niche fanbase, and I was a part of it. Naturally, when I got the new assignment of writing about the Canadian film The King Tide, a new film starring both Young and Crawford, I was overjoyed. And the film just happens to carry the same moody DNA as that show, which is more than I could have ever asked for. It’s contextually and thematically much different, though. Part Midnight Mass (2021), part The Village (2005), this is an exhibition of “what if Mike Flanagan and M. Night Shyamalan had a love child” There’s an undeniable The Wicker Man (1973) influence as well, if you think about it. Yet, The King Tide, directed by Christian Sparkles, can very much stand on its own as a quasi-horror-drama that is bound to serve you some food for thought. The ending of it (and the whole thing) does call for a lot of discussion, and we’re just going to have it here in this article.
Spoilers Ahead
What Happens in the Film?
The King Tide begins on a grim note. In the middle of a dark night, Grace (Lara Jean Chorostecki, who you might have seen in Hannibal) has a miscarriage. She lives on a relatively small fishing island, where her husband, Bobby (Crawford), is the mayor. Grace’s ailing mother, Faye (Frances Fisher, whose most notable role still remains James Cameron’s Titanic), suffers from dementia. Local doctor and family friend Beau (Young) consoles Bobby and asks him to stay strong. The next morning, there’s a shipwreck, and the towners, including Bobby, Beau, and some others, go to help. While they’re at it, Bobby badly injures himself and starts bleeding out in the water. He then rescues a baby and realizes that his injury has magically healed.Â
A decade later, Bobby and Grace are raising the baby that was found. They’ve named her Isla, and she happens to possess the supernatural ability to heal people in close proximity. Isla can also summon fish at will, just by dipping her hand into the water. Bobby and Grace carefully harness their adoptive daughter’s special powers by scheduling visitations, where the villagers stand in line to see Isla for any sort of healing. Faye’s dementia has also been cured, and she’s right as rain. Thanks to Isla, Beau has nothing much to do anymore, and he spends most of his days drunk. However, he doesn’t harbor any grudges against Isla and actually adores the kid. Beau’s son, Junior, is friends with Isla, and the two of them are pretty much inseparable. When Isla and Junior randomly come across a dead fawn filled with wasps, she gets curious and puts her hand on the animal. Just as she does that, the wasps respond and cover her hand. Junior, meanwhile, gets stung by a wasp and screams for help. Isla instinctively closes her fist, and all the wasps fall dead instantly. This is a very important scene that works almost as a foreshadowing of what is to come.
Does Isla’s power go away?
Instead of spelling everything out for the audience, The King Tide lets you figure things out one by one. This community has gone completely Neo-Luddite. They’ve cut themselves totally off from the mainland; there’s zero technology around (except a few souvenirs like an old TV Beau keeps to himself), and thanks to Isla, there’s no shortage of food. As the mayor, Bobby has made sure that nobody ever leaves the island. His agenda is quite clear: protecting the child. The more people get to know about the child’s power, the more risk of exploitation she falls into. Bobby is not wrong here, but the obvious question that comes to your head is: how’s allowing the villagers to take advantage of Isla’s power okay? He obviously thinks it’s alright, but that’s not how it should be.Â
With the community facing a shortage of fish, one of the locals, Dillon, seeks Bobby’s help – basically taking Isla into the water and letting her do the magic. Bobby is skeptical, but he gives in. As fate would have it, on the same day Isla is out fishing with her father and his fishermen friends, a boy on the island, Phillip, gets terribly sick after consuming poisonous berries. What’s worse here is that Phillip does this as a part of a game these children play, where one of them falls sick intentionally and then they run to Isla for immediate help. It might sound stupid and dangerous, but you’ve got to consider the fact that these kids have no life or form of entertainment on the island. The thrill-seeking only stems from boredom. It’s too bad their parents never really thought about it. Anyway, with Isla not around, Beau does his best to save Phillip by pumping the berries out of his stomach. Unfortunately, Beau fails, and by the time Bobby and Isla rush to the scene, it’s all over.
Isla might have superpowers, but she’s a ten-year-old who has just lost a friend. While trying to talk to their daughter about the whole thing, Bobby and Grace realize that Isla’s powers are gone. She can’t heal Grace instantly when she accidentally cuts her finger anymore. Bobby, being a dad with good intentions, immediately lets the people know about it and announces that there won’t be any visitation from this point on. With Isla’s powers gone, it’s futile anyway. But the community refuses to accept it. Isla’s own grandmother, Faye, is very much against Bobby, and she urges that they should put the matter to a vote, hinting at that’s how decisions are made in this world. It’s ironic how Bobby is unable to protect his daughter, despite being the mayor of the town. If there’s one person who’s seeing what these people are doing to Isla, then that has to be Beau, who makes an attempt to remind people about their seemingly normal lives before Isla. But by this point, the villagers are too far gone. Naturally, they ignore Beau, and the visitations continue.
Does Faye Kill Beau?
The moment you realize that Beau is the equivalent of a moral compass in this narrative, you know for a fact that he’s a goner. I mean, he probably would have been alive if Isla’s powers hadn’t come back, but once Grace discovers that her daughter still has those abilities but that they can only work when she’s sleeping, the narrative confirms that it’s heading towards chaos. If choice is something that defines what kind of humans we are, then Grace should get the award of “worst mother ever.” Yeah, I get that it’s too painful to accept your mom’s dementia is back, but who in their right mind would endanger their own daughter for that? It also suggests that Grace never really saw Isla as her own kin and treated her as this magical being, unlike Bobby, who keeps telling Grace not to reveal that Isla’s power is back. There’s no doubt that Bobby genuinely cares for his daughter, but he lacks both the courage and intelligence that’s needed to handle the situation! So, despite knowing how wrong it is, he gives in to Faye’s plan of drugging the child continuously and getting the benefits out of her. Of course, the community would starve without Isla’s help, but why don’t they consider the option of seeking help from the mainland?
What Are the Central Themes Of The Film?
We eventually find out that Bobby might be the mayor, but it’s Faye who’s running the show. She has her own support group, where people from the community regularly gather and discuss how terrible their lives used to be, so it’s only justified that they use this magical child for their own gain. Speaking of the magic, props to the director for making the whole magic realism aspect of the movie very realistic. Once you get settled on the idea of a mutant (sorry for randomly dropping the term, but I’m not exactly wrong) child saving her community, everything starts appearing normal. That can’t prevent you from seeing through the ugliness of these people, a festering society that would do anything for their own gain. Compassion is a rare thing, and only Beau and Bobby seem to have it. It’s only natural that these two would think about getting Isla off the island. And they’ve got a ready-made solution for that: a boat carefully hidden by Phillip’s parents, Frank and Melissa. After what happened to their son, their delusion regarding the whole thing has understandably evaporated. They’ve asked Bobby for permission to leave the island before, which was not allowed, but it turns out the couple has gone ahead with their plan. Beau also wishes to leave with Junior, leaving only two more spaces on the boat—for Bobby and Isla. Sadly for the town doctor, Faye, who claims to be his best friend, has already suspected that he’s hatching some sort of plan. So she does exactly what you would expect from her at this point—killing Beau by poisoning him without any hesitation. So much for curing the old hag’s dementia!
As if killing Beau wasn’t enough, the villagers had to torch his home as well. A heartbroken Junior sees it from afar while his father’s murderers try to console him. Seeing this whole chaos as an opportunity, Frank and Melissa leave with their daughter, leaving Bobby and Isla behind. However, the next morning, two strangers—Emily and Lucy—arrive on the island. They’re obviously the first people from outside to set foot here in years. Lucy happens to be a cop, and Emily is in social service, looking after child welfare. They’re only here because they’ve got this disturbing report of this child, Isla, getting abused by the towners from a family they picked up on the mainland (no prizes for guessing who they are). Faye and the people are understandably jittery, and their xenophobia is on full display here. The term basically means having unjustified hatred for unfamiliar things or people. It’s likely nothing would have happened if Faye and company had just let Emily visit Isla in peace, but they had to create a ruckus after all!
What Happens to Isla?
After Faye, Dillon has to be the character who should be skinned alive. As Bobby takes Emily to his house, Dillon and the curious bystanders follow. Even after Emily told them to mind their own business, they didn’t show any sign of leaving. Of course, they can’t tell these people that they’re only here for their business, if you know what I mean! Inside Bobby’s house, Emily has a pretty routine conversation with Isla. She doesn’t find anything that suggests that the child is in any danger. Only when Isla asks Emily to thank her before leaving does the social worker realize something is off. She lets Bobby know that she wishes to take the family to the mainland for further investigation. I’m pretty certain Bobby sees this as a blessing only, as he wishes for the same thing. But how could they leave with the vultures outside? Faye is absolutely livid, and Dillon has had enough, so he takes out his gun and points it at Lucy. Seeing the situation getting out of hand, Bobby tries to calm things down, but nobody is going to listen to him at this point. The gun goes off, and Bobby gets caught in crossfire, while Lucy dies on the spot. Emily begs the towners to let her go in exchange for her silence, but these monsters are not going to let that happen.
With Bobby on the brink of his death, Isla is needed right away. Given that her power only works if she falls asleep, Grace and Faye decide to force-feed her the sleeping pill. Their attempt to explain why Isla needs to sleep is half-hearted and hurried, which further proves how little they care about the little girl’s physical and mental wellbeing. It’s heartbreaking to hear Isla screaming while her mother and grandmother are physically abusing her into taking the pill. Thankfully for Isla, Junior is here—with a shotgun. He knows his father’s death was not an accident; it’s Faye’s doing only, and now he’s out for revenge. Not to mention, he wants the wretched mongrels to leave his friend alone. But Faye and Grace are not going to stop after all, as they clearly don’t consider Junior a threat. As a result, Faye gets shot right in the temple by Junior, which leads to a really scared and shocked Isla screaming her heart out and closing her fists. Remember what happens when Isla closes her fist? Yes, everyone dies. Sadly, that includes Junior and Bobby as well, who didn’t deserve to.
The King Tide ends with Isla looking out at the water, where more than one boat is appearing, most certainly from the mainland. There’s no doubt that she’ll be rescued and taken to the mainland, but what happens after that? And how’s she going to explain all the deaths? Have Frank and Melissa told the world about her power yet? The film chooses to leave these questions for us to speculate on, which I believe is a great choice. As far as the towners go, they got the ending they deserved. We can only hope Isla is treated better from here on, but if you ask me, I don’t see that happening. This is a terrible world filled with selfish people. When her own mother and grandmother didn’t hesitate to do such things to her, how can Isla expect things to be any better?