Seagrass: Superb Canadian Drama Captures Dynamic of a Family in Free Fall

By Liz Braun

Rating: A

Seagrass is a small Canadian film that delivers a huge emotional impact. The accomplished drama is a feature debut from writer-director Meredith Hama-Brown.

Set in the 1990s on an island on the British Columbia coast, Seagrass concerns an ordinary family in crisis. As the story begins, married couple Judith (Ally Maki), who is a Japanese Canadian, and her white husband Steve (Luke Roberts) are taking their daughters on what looks like a beach holiday but proves to be a couples’ therapy retreat.

In group sessions, Steve and Judith do their best to express what ails their marriage. There’s been a breakdown in communication and intimacy; grief over the recent death of her mother is also a factor in Judith’s discontent.

With her mother went Judith’s last tie to her own Japanese heritage, and she has just begun to grasp how little she knows about her parents’ lives or culture. Their internment during the war seems to have created a legacy of shame and secrecy, complicating Judith’s identity issues.

As if to underline how Judith and Steve are floundering, another couple at therapy, Pat and Carol (Chris Pang and Sarah Gadon) seem to have the perfect relationship. Pat is of Asian heritage, like Judith, but unlike her he knows a lot about his own history. Pat and Carol have their own issues, but on the surface their lives are perfect.

Getting beneath what’s on the surface is key to the story.

The adults are the main event in Seagrass, but the beauty of Hama-Brown’s film is in everything going on around the edges, specifically with Judith and Steve’s children, adolescent Stephanie (Nyha Huang Breitkreuz) and six-year-old Emmy (Remy Marthaller). The world looms large to children, and the children’s experience of their parents’ unhappiness highlights the deeper damage being done.

Seagrass is permeated with anxiety, most of it stemming from the kids’ point of view. The wild landscape of the island they’re visiting, for example, includes forbidding-looking caves at the edge of the ocean. Emmy believes the caves to be haunted.

The undertoad!

What Judith grapples with — her mother’s death, her crumbling marriage, her complex racial identity issues— is magnified in her daughters’ lives. What concerns Judith haunts her children, almost literally, and the sorrow and confusion the adults experience become a nightmare for the children.

Through the kids' vantage point, Hama-Brown and cinematographer Norm Li create an emotional vertigo not unlike that available in certain Alice Munro stories, in the way a domestic drama suddenly becomes something far darker.

Seagrass had a world debut at TIFF 2023 and has been winning audiences (and awards) ever since.

Seagrass. Written and directed by Meredith Hama-Brown. Starring Ally Maki, Luke Roberts, and Sarah Gadon. In theatres February 23 in Toronto (TIFF Lightbox), Vancouver (5th Ave Cineplex) and Montreal (Cinema du Parc and Cineplex Forum) and in other Canadian cities through March and April.