Movie Review: Adam & the Water

Adam & the Water
Director: Matthew Appleby
Writer: Matthew Appleby
Starring: Qado, Elisa Alemparte, and Laine Korn.
Rated: 3 Stars (6 stars on IMDB)
Review by: Astilbe

Adam is stuck. Anxious. Alone. Trapped in a nine to five. Lost without purpose, he meets Eva. As she enters Adam’s life, something changes, and a new reality awakens him.

Daydreaming is harmless, right?

The fantasy elements of the storyline were subtle and hard to pin down. Adam sank so deeply into some of them that it wasn’t always possible for me to tell where the line was between his vivid imagination, real life, and the possibility that some of the things he experienced might be too surreal to be explained logically. This is the sort of storytelling I’m immediately drawn to, and I appreciated how much nuance the director included in every twist and turn. Not everything in life needs to be explained, and those scenes were stronger because of how much freedom the audience was given to come up with our own interpretations of them.

With that being said, I struggled with how ambivalent the ending was. It could be interpreted in so many different ways that I was never quite sure which ones the director hoped his audience would choose even after I watched the ending multiple times. The protagonist was someone I grew to care about quite a lot about, so it was a little disappointing for me as a viewer to say goodbye to him while so many of my questions about what he’d decided to do with his life remained unanswered.

It didn’t take me long at all to like Adam. I empathized with how difficult it was for him to cope with his mental illness when he didn’t seem to have a strong support system or the emotional energy to seek professional help. Circumstances like that can make it even harder than usual for someone to recover, especially when they’re also as introspective and intelligent as Adam was. He knew he had a problem, but taking even the first step to finding a solution to it was almost more than he could do. Some of the best scenes in my opinion were the ones that showed his reactions to this dilemma and how mental illness can make even the smallest nudges in the right direction like asking for help feel impossible in that moment.

Adam & the Water was a thoughtful exploration of mental illness and how technology affects modern relationships.