From what we've seen of The Impossible so far, including some stark stills and a powerful, impressionistic trailer, Juan Antonio Bayona has created a new kind of disaster movie. It's certainly poles apart from the box-office fodder of the '70s which set A-listers loose amid a variety of burning, sinking and generally stricken scenarios. If you've seen **The Poseidon Adventure **lately, you'll know that it was a time when no Christmas tree was complete without at least one Ernest Borgnine in it.
Here, of course, the disaster is very real. This new poster shows Bayona's version of the 2004 Boxing Day tsunami and its aftermath. The disaster leaves one Spanish family split up and in danger of joining Thailand's thousands of fatalities. Naomi Watts and Ewan McGregor play the holidaymaking parents of three boys in a real-life episode that should prove an intimate route into a pan-Asian catastrophe. If it's half as good as Bayona's last, The Orphanage, another melancholy family drama with a seaside setting, it will be well worth catching.
And you can catch The Impossible when it gets a UK release on January 1.