The Island Between Tides: Hitchcock Could Only Dream of Making a Movie Like This

By Chris Knight

Rating: A-

The Film They Wouldn’t Let Hitchcock Make would be a great title for any movie, whether the statement was true or not. In this case, it happens to be the real deal, although the filmmakers ultimately went with The Island Between Tides.

In 1964, Hitch, riding high on a string of hits that included North by Northwest and Psycho, tried to make an adaptation of Mary Rose, a play by J.M. Barrie (of Peter Pan fame) that he’d seen in London as a young man.

It would be called The Island That Wants To Be Visited, and Tippi Hedren would star. The studio said no, and Hitchcock later joked that his contract with Universal allowed him to make any movie he wanted, as long as it cost less than $3 million and was not Mary Rose.

Decades later, Hedren’s daughter Melanie Griffith bought the rights and tried to get it made but also failed. Which brings us to Vancouver writers and directors Austin Andrews and Andrew Holmes and the creation of the first film adaptation of Mary Rose. And to think it only took 105 years!

It’s a crepuscular creepy tale, pitched as a supernatural thriller and ghost story but, thanks to a dose of time loops and other temporal anomalies, is a science-fiction drama as well.

Paloma Kwiatkowski stars as Lily, troubled young mother to infant Jared. Years earlier, on a wilderness camping trip with her parents and sister Zinnia (played as an adult by Camille Sullivan), little Lily vanished for several days, reappearing none the worse for wear, and apparently unaware that she’d been gone for more than an hour.

That was in 1982. The action picks up again in 1998, and finds Lily drawn to return to the tidal island that left such a mark on her youth. But on this visit, she loses decades rather than days and returns to her B.C. hometown in 2024. (It’s a similar gap to the one traversed by Marty McFly in Back to the Future, but the differences are more subtle; cellphones and selfies are Lily’s first anachronisms.)

She finds that people have moved. Others have died. And those who haven’t — well, baby Jared, now intensely played by David Mazouz, is older than she is. And, like his mother, he seems to have become unmoored in time, seeing — and seen by — past residents of the region. He thinks they’re ghosts. They think the same of him. Who’s to say who’s right?

I’m not familiar with the original production of Mary Rose, nor its revivals and various adaptations, including a book and a radio play. Though I have already started falling down a rabbit hole of investigation. In the meantime, while I can’t say how faithful a telling this one is, I can confirm that it’s an elegantly crafted tale, beautifully performed by its mostly Canadian cast, including the lovely Gabrielle Rose as a sympathetic librarian.

The Island Between Tides will speak to anyone who has ever pondered the porous curtain that separates now from then, life from death, and here from gone. It piles muddle upon mystery, but always with the sense that its makers (and Barrie before them) know what they’re doing. We’re in good hands.

Oh, and while I didn’t notice an homage to the (admittedly overused) “Hitchcock zoom,” also known as the dolly zoom, there was a fun and fascinating trick in which the filmmakers leave the camera locked on a static outdoor scene, keeping all the objects in the same location while the lighting suddenly changes from day to night, as though someone had thrown a switch on the sun. It’s fabulously disconcerting. I daresay, Hitchcock would be proud.

CLICK HERE to see Bonnie Laufer’s video interview with stars Paloma Kwiatkowski and Camille Sullivan.

The Island Between Tides. Directed by Austin Andrews and Andrew Holmes. Starring Paloma Kwiatkowski, Camille Sullivan, and David Mazouz. Opens April 25 at the Carlton in Toronto, and the Mayfair in Ottawa.