From the first frame, The Son and the Sea unfolds like sunlight flickering over restless waters. Stroma Cairns’ camera roams the Scottish coast with a fluid curiosity, finding corners that feel lived-in and intimately known. These images are volatile, but also a quiet tenderness tucked into the ebb and flow, hinting at the emotional currents the film will carry.

At its center is Jonah (Jonah West), a man-child stumbling through his twenties with more charm than direction. Some days he soars, others he sinks. Cairns mirrors his instability with glittering, fast-paced editing that makes his moods feel tidal—sweeping, unpredictable, overwhelming. West’s performance is magnetic, capturing Jonah’s contradictions with devastating clarity. Every high and low plays across his face, every flicker of shame beneath his bravado.

The script allows Jonah, his best friend Lee (Stanley Brock), and Charlie (Connor Tompkins), a Deaf man they meet along the coast, to share moments of softness rarely afforded to young men on screen. Their vulnerability isn’t heightened or treated as a grand statement, but written naturally into how they relate to one another. In doing so, the film resists the expectation that masculinity must be performed through toughness, showing instead how strength can live in sensitivity. Cairns’ closeness to her cast permits them to be honest with each other.

That honesty carries into the film’s use of ASL, woven in without spectacle or heavy-handedness. Some of the most moving moments come in silence, where glances and gestures say more than words, proof that love and recognition don’t always need speech.

Grief is present here too, though quietly. Jonah’s mourning for his father is touched with subtlety, sometimes so much that it feels just out of reach. But in the scenes with his great-aunt, whose memory is fading, it finds its sharpest expression. One moment, when Jonah slips headphones over her ears, nearly wrecked me. In her fleeting joy, you see everything Jonah fears losing: his past, his family, his own sense of steadiness. It’s tender, unspoken, unforgettable.

Like The Outrun (2024), The Son and the Sea treats the Scottish coast as more than a backdrop. Its ruggedness echoes Jonah’s volatility, while its quiet corners ground the story. Cairns films these places with a closeness that makes them inseparable from the characters, a world that feels both harsh and deeply lived-in.

The film doesn’t moralize or scold; it observes, with rare empathy, how stumbling toward adulthood can be clumsy, ugly, funny, and yet beautiful in its imperfection. For a debut, it’s remarkably assured. Cairns captures young masculinity with a gentleness that feels both refreshing and necessary. Like the tide itself, The Son and the Sea carries traces of grief, tenderness, and joy all at once. It left me shaken, not because of what happens, but because of how deeply it understands what it feels like to be young, lost, and still reaching for connection.

Review Courtesy of Jake Fittipaldi

Feature Image Courtesy of TIFF