A young woman accidentally sends a confessional text to her crush.
SEASICK is used with permission from Lindsey Ryan. Learn more at / seasickfilm .
Sadie is a deckhand working on a ferry boat for the summer. It's an unglamorous job, but it's enlivened by her co-workers -- most especially the ferry captain, Jess, whom Sadie has a crush on.
Sadie is texting a friend about her crush on Jess when her attention is distracted, so she doesn't realize until it is too late that she didn't text her friend -- she sent the text somehow to Jess instead. Though the reception on her cell phone is thankfully not working this far out on the water, Sadie must try to intercept the message somehow before they go back to shore and her secret comes out.
Directed and written by Lindsey Ryan, this quietly compelling short drama is not just an intimate and incisive study about the quiet mortifications of a hidden romantic yearning, when saying or doing the wrong thing at the wrong time could lead to embarrassment. Immersed in a watery setting that is both wide-open and isolated, it's also a sharply observed portrait of how hiding a fundamental part of one's self and identity can raise the stakes of even the most ordinary mishaps, imbuing what should be normal young lives and milestones with a sense of peril and fear.
Reflecting the introverted, shy nature of its main character, the storytelling has a naturalistic, observational tenor, watchful of reactions, gestures and textures of moments. Sadie is on the margin of things, not quite belonging to her group of co-workers, led by the outgoing, charismatic Jess. Part of that is Sadie's shyness, but it's also by design: Sadie fears the discovery of her queer identity. But when she sends off a confessional type of text to Jess by accident, that secret threatens to come out, though Sadie gets something of a break because of her cell phone's slowness, allowing her to grapple with her feelings and try to find a way to rectify the situation.
As Sadie, actor Pauline Chalamet (of HBO's Sex Lives of College Girls) deftly captures not just a girl shimmering with the excitement of a crush nearby, but also the fundamental sensitivity of the character, whose latent anxieties heighten to acute panic due to the situation. Yet Sadie must still hide her spiraling emotions from the surface, adding to the stress of the situation and conveying the layers of fear and shame she deals with.
Though SEASICK offers Sadie a reprieve and ends on something of a zinger, what comes through is just how agonizing it is to keep a fundamental secret in a world that could be hostile to one's self. The storytelling's elegant, pared-down nature never overstates, but its sensitivity puts us in Sadie's headspace, and when she must reconcile herself to the notion of being discovered, we feel her pain that it's not on her own terms. Yet she summons her inner resolve to confront the situation finally, when she realizes the act of hiding is not sustainable anymore, both in the situation and for herself.