Stroma Cairns (2025)
A young man called Jonah gets out of bed and, for the next few screen minutes, experiences a mental horror show, jagged images of the drink-and-drugs-fuelled life that he apparently leads. Next, Jonah writes himself a to-do list – sort room, sort head, sort life. The Son and the Sea doesn’t show him delivering on the first of these but the closing implication of Stroma Cairns’ debut feature, screening at the London Film Festival, is that Jonah can tick the second item off the list – and thereby the third! He manages this by swapping his aimless, putrid existence in present-day London for the bracing air of a Scottish coastal village, where he travels with his mate Lee (Stanley Brock). Jonah has family there – his great-aunt, Marie – though Cairns and Imogen West, who co-wrote the screenplay with her, don’t give much sense of Jonah’s relationship hitherto with Marie. She now has dementia and has moved into a care home. Jonah and Lee stay in her recently vacated house in the village.
The set-up has echoes of Bill Forsyth’s Local Hero (1983) – Cairns’ village even has a conspicuous phone box – and Nora Fingscheidt’s The Outrun (2024). As in Fingscheidt’s film, the change of scenery doesn’t instantly work its magic on the protagonist. Jonah and Lee, who’ve spent most of the long train journey from London arguing swearily with each other, continue in the same vein after reaching their destination. Marie’s house has next to no mod cons. Jonah and Lee pass the time mostly in the pub since there’s nothing else to do. When they strike up conversations – with Charlie (Connor Tompkins) and Luke (Lewis Tompkins), deaf twins about the same age as Jonah and Lee, or pre-teen Sandy (Grant Lindsay) – Jonah is notably less friendly than Lee, who’s ready to learn bits of sign language from the twins to help communication with them. Morose Jonah visits the care home where he finds Marie[1] slumped in a chair and unresponsive. All in all, life in the village seems as bad as the one he left behind.
Jonah perks up a bit when he and Lee come across an elderly smallholder, a genial, trusting man who’s happy for the pair to borrow his rowboat for an outing that proves to be the turning point for Jonah. By now, Luke is in police custody and Charlie, for reasons connected with his brother, has fallen out with Sandy. Charlie comes on the boat with Jonah and Lee, who rows; Sandy sits alone, cliffside. It’s a lovely, sunny day and Jonah takes an impromptu, exultant dip in the sea. A little later, he, Lee and Charlie are clambering round seaweed-slippery rocks, where they find the unconscious body of Sandy, seemingly fallen from some way above. It’s thanks to Jonah’s insistence that they get the injured boy to hospital. While waiting there with Lee and Charlie for news, Jonah says a prayer, thanking God for enabling him and his companions to save Sandy, who does indeed pull through. The next time Jonah visits Marie, his tender voice and touch spark some kind of recognition in her eyes; she is last seen walking slowly down a corridor in the care home, her arm in Jonah’s. In the film’s closing scene, Jonah, Lee and Charlie head off together in a car, the land-and-seascape magnificent in what is still beautiful weather. The mood of this finale is thoroughly celebratory.
Where are they headed – on another day trip, back to London? The Son and the Sea is puzzling in various ways but it’s clear enough that you’re not meant to ask questions like that. The film recently had its world premiere at Toronto; the TIFF website explains that Cairns shows ‘three young men … learning, with quiet grace, what it means to grow up’. According to IMDb, the film describes how ‘connection goes beyond words, and joy can be found despite loss’. After spewing repetitive profanities for an hour or more, Jonah suddenly switches to thoughtfully worded prayer. Is the film, with its appealingly allusive title, meant to have religious meaning? Google’s AI overview is characteristically unequivocal:
‘No, The Son and the Sea is not a religious film; rather, it is a journey of self-discovery that uses faith-related touchstones, such as the protagonist’s name, to explore themes of internal growth. While its soundtrack can feel spiritual at times, the film’s message is that redemption comes from within, not from a higher power.’
I can see it would spoil things (and the film’s chances of high-profile festival screenings) if the answer were ‘Yes’: after all, ‘religious’ = bad. ‘Spiritual’ = good but the soundtrack, consisting of songs by the duo Toydrum and Gavin Clark, is purgatory, especially the drippy lyrics, though a folk number performed in a pub by Sandy’s mother is relatively OK: the singer has a pleasant voice. It’s important to say that Cairns gets good performances from her cast generally, particularly Jonah West and Connor Tompkins. As Troy Kotsur and Daniel Durant showed in Sian Heder’s CODA (2021), the combination of limited vocals and vigorous signing can make deaf performers in a film unusually expressive. Connor Tompkins certainly is.
Stroma Cairns herself was born with impaired hearing and deafness was clearly of great importance to her making the film. She also mentioned in her introduction to this LFF screening that the story draws on her own family history. The Son and the Sea is very much a family effort: Jonah and Imogen West are respectively Cairns’ brother and mother (and the late Gavin Clark was Jonah’s father). A disability theme, in conjunction with major personal connections to what’s been put on screen, will, for many viewers, disarm criticism of the film. I can only say I’m not among them. The deafness element, as represented by Connor Tompkins’ Charlie, is one of The Son and the Sea’s most promising yet the script exasperatingly loses sight of who the character is. Charlie says he’s scared of water: how come he goes on the boat with no demurral? He’s also scared of the prospect of London, which may be his destination at the end. Is his powerful animus against Sandy simply dispelled by the latter’s accident? In the film’s closing stages, the role of Lee is probably underwritten more deliberately: it’s striking that chatty Lee, who knows Jonah better than anyone, is virtually silenced after his pal’s conversion to positive and penitent thinking. Stroma Cairns stressed how vital it was to her that the film should be subtitled throughout: she wanted it to be fully accessible to non-hearing as well as hearing audiences. To put it another way, we can all be equally baffled by The Son and the Sea.
10 October 2025
[1] Only a handful of characters are included in the IMDb listing so The Son and the Sea‘s other cast members, Marie included, will have to go unnamed.
