Seahorse (Raindance Film Festival 2026) A Compassionate Feature Debut

Having just completed its run at the UK Raindance Film Festival, Seahorse is an affecting and well-intentioned feature debut from Canadian actor & filmmaker Aisha Evelyna.

As well as writing and directing the film, Evelyna also takes the lead role of Nola, a Toronto woman seeking stability following a stay in a mental health facility. The opportunity to work as a sous chef at her friend Adelaide’s (Ruth Goodwin) fancy new restaurant initially looks to provide such an opportunity, but it is managed by Adelaide’s awful fiancé, Rob (Brett Donahue). After a particularly gruelling shift in which Nola has once again bore the brunt of Rob’s criticism and spite, our heroine spots an unhoused man taking from the trash cans in the alleyway beyond the restaurant, and is sucker punched to learn that the man is her estranged father, Cyrus (Joseph Marcell). As a tentative reconnection forms between father and daughter, we learn, though flashbacks, the factors that led to the familial split, whilst we also witness Nola navigate her own mental health issues and a potential romance with neighbouring restaurant worker, Emile (Alden Adair).

Seahorse is a deeply personal project for Evelyna, who is estranged from her own father and is on record as speaking about his housing precarity in the interviews that have arisen from the film’s release. As a result, it’s easy to consider the narrative here as (semi) autobiographical; exploring the possibilities that may occur should Evelyna ever happen across her father in Toronto, a city that has, like so many other cities across the world, a housing crisis at its core. The fact that Seahorse takes such a genuine, personal place as its narrative starting point makes me feel particularly bad about saying that the film didn’t wholly work for me. Whilst I do not deny Evelyna’s admirable intentions here, I was a little dismayed to find that her film about homelessness made the error of effectively turning the unhoused character into something of a dramatic device that exists simply to explore the central protagonist’s narrative development and journey. The decision to overlook or fail to provide the unhoused character with much of an inner life or agency of his own is Seahorse‘s major blind spot; authenticity is sacrificed for emotional manipulation, a practice more common in Hollywood than independent cinema. Because of this, by the time that the credits rolled, I didn’t feel that the film had truly succeeded in humanising the issue and, therefore, Evelyna had failed in her aims.

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Perhaps the issue here is that Evelyna took too much on for what is still, we must remember, her feature debut. Writing, directing and starring in a film, and a deeply personal movie to boot, ensures that your voice is central. This can often be to the benefit, but it also leads to some mistakes that may have been avoided if a more varied creative input was also baked into the mix. Basically, I think Seahorse needed a few more voices to steer the film on a course that would complete all of its aims successfully. I also wonder if too much was being attempted with the narrative too. With the film already tackling such weighty social issues as homelessness and familial estrangement, I wonder if the added layers of Nola’s mental health struggles and her own far from comfortable financial and domestic situation were just too much for Seahorse to take on? For example, whilst the decision to explore Nola’s trauma in a hallucinatory manner is visually effective, it often tipped the scales away from the social realism and into something more abstract and set the audience up for a mental breakdown that, ultimately and thankfully, was not forthcoming.

Despite my reservations, Seahorse does a lot of things right. It’s empathy and compassion is both clear-sighted and apparant from the start and its anger at social inequality is handled in a really interesting way as the overall tone of the film is gentle rather than didactic or hectoring. It’s almost like Evelyna understands that there’s a lot of pain and trauma to be examined and explored here and that to do so in anything other than this low key and tender manner may feel overwhelming or simply add to the frustrations. It marks her out as an interesting voice and is complimented both by the cinematography from Ian Carleton and the performances of her fellow cast members.

Joseph Marcell takes time out from portraying Mike Bubbins’ foil in the enjoyable BBC2/BBC Wales sitcom Mammoth to portray Nola’s father Cyrus, reminding us that he still holds international appeal following the success he had with his best known role of Geoffrey the butler in the 90s US sitcom The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air. Though the role is an impactful one for the narrative, it’s a relatively small one in terms of screentime, and Marcell elevates his every moment to make the character memorable long after his scenes have concluded. Elsewhere, Goodwin, Donahue and Adair all deliver performances that help sell the emotional beats of Evelyna’s narrative, building solid foundations to both the story and the character of Nola. Donahue especially has a difficult role as the obnoxious Rob, but even he finds some notes of interiority and even possible redemption or sympathy at times.

The star of the film, both literally and figuratively, is Evelyna whose characterisation of Nola is believable and relatable from the off. It’s a performance that easily garners support and sympathy from the audience and is imbued with the empathy and compassion that Seahorse is made of.

MARK’S ARCHIVE – SEAHORSE