Still the Water

I've decided to watch it because I live on PEI. This is a first movie for Susan Rogers, and I hope the second one will be better. As other people said, it is not easy to get what is going on, too many unnecessary accents with other things missing. On positive note - beautiful views, lovely music.

Still the Water offers nothing new in its premise: another homecoming story with a down on his luck protagonist seeking help from family and friends.

On the plus side, the actors' performance makes it compelling and keeps you interested because you never know what happened years before that made them hate each other. When it's finally revealed, it's kind of a let down because many films work around the same subject.

But it's worth watching all the same for Ry Barret's excellent performance as the protagonist: a failed athlete that goes beyond stereotypes showing emotion instead of brute force (even if his appearance makes you think otherwise at first).

Also, the environments and cinematography in general are excellent, almost another character in itself.

Still the Water is highly reccomended to movie fans who seek drama, emotion and actors who really feel like human beings on screen.

This is a gorgeous movie, and the PEI locations create wonderful atmosphere, and it's worth watching just for this. The cast give worthy performances, too.

The soundtrack is solid too, although I found the use of songs somewhat distracting - I am not sure if it's because the lyrics were taking me out of the moment, or if the tempos didn't jive with what my brain was expecting. It may highlight an underlying concern with the structure of the film.

I enjoyed watching this, so I don't want this criticism to come off too harshly. There is a big story here with lots of backstory, and a bunch of characters that are important in it - so there are lots of ways this story could be told, and from a variety of perspectives. But the way this story is structured didn't help my empathize with the characters perhaps as much as it should have, as I felt oddly detached from everyone in the family right up to the conclusion.

The scenario is setup quickly for us, and very early on the family is reunited. We quickly learn that something in their past has driven a wedge between them, but what and why is revealed very slowly to the audience. VERY slowly. Which means that we have a lot of angst-filled character exchanges and we, the audience, are confused bystanders unable to relate to what is motivating the characters interactions with one another.

I feel the scene structure probably would have worked better for a novel, where we have access to more of the internal narrative.

So while it's not a story problem necessarily, it dilutes in the effectiveness in my opinion. Pretty much everything we need to understand is eventually revealed, but I don't think the finale was as cathartic as the soundtrack makes me feel they were shooting for.

I am not a hockey afficionado, and the hockey scenes worked adequately for me. I see that serious hockey fans are being quite critical here - I think that is unjustified. This isn't a movie about hockey any more than it is a movie about fishing. This is a drama about a family with a troubled past, and one of them happened to be a hockey player, which provides the character with the necessary local notoriety required for the story.

A nice effort, and I would suggest it is well worth watching for the performances, and for those that just love to see PEI on screen. I would love to see more movies like this.

This movie was a frustrating watch. Everyone is angry at one another from the start and you don't know as we the audience slowly and painfully gets answers which never seems to justify why everyone feels the way they feel. The acting is poor around. The hockey scenes are so poorly done I sort of wish they were left out altogether.

On the bright side, the movie looks great.

This is exactly what an 'indie' film should be. Beautiful photography, incredible location, deep and emotional writing and understated performances.

There's a lot of talent on view here.

Highly recommended.