Time And Tide

The sea brings in otherworldly secrets in The Drowned

- By Nick Setchfield

I WANTED THE AUDIENCE ON their toes,” says Samuel Clemens, whose debut feature The Drowned gives a hauntingly offbeat twist to the crime thriller genre.

“I thought, ‘I want to be a film director. I’ve got to make a mark.’ I didn’t want to be lost among lots of other movies. As a debut I knew that if I spelled everything out, if I did it as a linear movie, then it might be a good movie but it might just disappear. So there was a conscious decision to do something that left the audience with a real ambiguity, discussing what this or that means.

“I just wanted to make something where maybe an image would stay with you, and you might tell someone, ‘Oh, there’s this film I saw...’”