THE KING TIDE – directed by Christian Sparkes – (some spoilers) ⁓

The opening scenes are full of mood and mystery. On an isolated island off the Newfoundland coast, Grace (Lara Jean Chorostecki) has a miscarriage on a stormy night. Her husband Bobby (Clayne Crawford), comforts her, then goes out to help Beau (Aden Young) repair a downed power line. Grace’s disabled mother Faye (Frances Fisher), who seems to have only limited awareness of her surroundings, sits on the front porch.

After power is restored, Bobby and Beau walk to a spot overlooking the sea, and talk.

BEAU: “Boys are sayin’ the catch is light again. Mainlanders out there trawling day and night, and now all their boats are trashed.”
BOBBY: “It’s just a little storm. Nothing we can’t come back from.”
BEAU: “Yeah. Makes you wonder, though, what we’re still doing out here.”
BOBBY: “I didn’t know we were supposed to be doing anything.”

They hear the wail of a baby and spot an overturned lifeboat near the shore. On Grace’s porch, Faye seems to sense that something important has happened as the child is being rescued.

Ten years later, the village is prosperous and the foundling has developed healing powers and is able to cure all ailments. The townspeople line up for individual sessions in which the girl reads to them from children’s books, making their maladies vanish. The child’s designated foster parents, Grace and Bobby, have named her Isla (a name meaning “island”, derived from Latin via Old French). One wonders where Isla (Alix West Lefler) was before being cast adrift in that lifeboat.

After reading a story about a chipmunk chasing his own tail, Isla gets curious about the source of it. Flipping to the back of the book, she discovers that it was first published in Paris, France. “Where’s France?,” she asks. “The mainland?” Faye explains that it’s a made-up place for the story. (The name Faye means “fairy” and also comes from Latin via Old French).

Shortly after discovering Isla’s healing powers, the island’s residents severed all contact with the mainland.

Isla and her friend Junior (Cameron Nicoll) come across a beehive. Isla is curious and allows the bees to alight on her hand. They do not sting her. The bees are less friendly to Junior and after they begin to attack him, Isla clenches her fist and all the bees fall dead. She asks Junior to tell no one about this, and he agrees. The girl may appear to be a faith healer who only heals people because they believe they are being healed, but the bee incident demonstrates that her powers are real.

The islanders have found immortality of a sort, for at least as long as Isla remains alive. (It is not known if she can cure her own ailments.) But Isla has another talent. She can summon fish into nearby waters, greatly increasing the catch of the village fishermen. Conflict over the use of her talents precipitates a tragedy. Phillip (Kevin Cromwell) intentionally eats poison berries presuming that Isla will cure him. He does not know that Isla is out helping the fishermen catch fish. The boy dies, and when Isla cannot bring him back from the dead, she loses her healing abilities.

Isla’s cures are not permanent, at least if Faye’s condition is any indication. Whatever problems Grace’s mother had to start with begin to return, although the other townspeople seem to remain healthy. At a town meeting called to discuss how to deal with the loss of Isla’s powers, Faye explains her view of Isla’s origins: “I’m just tired of pretending,” she tells a meeting of the townspeople. “Isla isn’t just a gifted child. She’s not a star athlete or a top scholar. She’s much greater than that. She’s from the stars and the sea. She was delivered to us on this island on the eve of the King Tide. And those mainlanders, they can’t touch us here.”

Faye’s daughter Grace believes that Isla was an answer to her own prayers. Grace tells Bobby that on the day she lost her baby “I prayed — and I never pray — and then you went down to the water and you found Isla. You think that’s just a coincidence?”

Isla apologizes to Faye, whose condition continues to deteriorate, for not being able to heal her again, and asks what it felt like when she was healed the first time. Faye responds with a hug, and says: “like this”.

Did Grace’s ‘prayers’ somehow summon a sea spirit to the island for the purpose of rescuing Faye from mental and physical decline? Might Faye also be “from the stars and the sea”? Is she a merrow-like creature holding the rest of the island’s population in thrall?

It is discovered that when Isla is asleep, her powers still work. The first thing Grace does after finding this out is have the sleeping child heal her mother. And when the town is threatened with starvation because of a declining fish catch, the Mayor is persuaded (by Faye) to allow Isla to be drugged so that while sleeping she can draw fish into the nets. The drugs used are Faye’s old prescriptions, which were issued by Beau, the guy who ran a clinic on the island before Isla’s arrival made such things unnecessary. Not everyone approves of drugging Isla, and Beau is one of the dissenters. Faye poisons Beau, ostensibly to prevent him from interfering with the continued abuse of Isla, but there might be more to it. She tells Beau “I’m not going back” and is emphatic about that. Going back to where or what?

Someone takes a boat to the mainland to report what’s happening to authorities. A catastrophe follows, but only after Faye is harmed.

Director Christian Sparkes told Pat Mullen of That Shelf: “It was interesting to give this dark cultish twist to Newfoundland specifically because Newfoundland is often painted as a cute, colourful, colloquial parody of itself. When you look at the tourism ads and you look at Republic of Doyle, people have this idea of the colourful houses and the happy people waving you over, and that’s great. It’s done Newfoundland proud and done well for the community. But that’s not my Newfoundland. That’s not the Newfoundland that interests me. I much more respond to the artwork of David Blackwood and Michael Crummey and this idea of Newfoundland Gothic. I’ve tried to contribute to that in my past films like Cast No Shadow. This was an opportunity to do it again.”

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THE KING TIDE can be streamed on TUBI,
and is available on DVD and Blu-ray.