When the tsunami is the star, then the movie is a gem, otherwise it shamelessly racks up the emotional pitch to bursting point and has more "impossible" coincidences than any "real" story could possibly have. But hey it appears to meet the requirements of your popular cinema goer!

This is the ‘true story’, we are told, of a Spanish family which managed to survive the Boxing Day tsunami. It would have helped the film’s claim to veracity if they had not been made British, presumably to make the film an easier sell in the Anglophone market. No doubt it was ‘inspired by true events’, as films usually hedge it, but there is far too much dramatic contrivance for it to feel anything like authentic.

Watts and McGregor are fine, as is ex-Billy Elliot Tom Holland as their eldest son, and the tsunami itself is impressively realised. Director J. A. Bayona (of the excellent ghost story The Orphanage) manages everything with confidence and some interesting flourishes. However, the script is clearly not the work of a native speaker, there is some distractingly inept post-sync voice work (unless the Odeon messed up the audio track), and as so often there is a horribly loud and syrupy score which is slathered on to any emotional moment. Dealing with such a catastrophe, the film-makers needed to work with restraint and assiduous realism if they were not to be accused of crass exploitation. The Impossible looks real, but sounds fake.