Premiering at Soho Horror Fest is Chilean drama-horror What The Tide Dragged In, an intriguing but ultimately underwhelming exploration of grief from director Patricio Valladares. What The Tide Dragged In fits into the burgeoning world of mumblecore cinema. Yes, I hate that term as much as you do (‘elevated horror’ hasn’t got anything on this), but it’s basically defined by a naturalistic feel and an emphasis on dialogue over heavy plot or effects. Quite why this term exists is a mystery, as you can use it to describe countless indie films of varying genres, but What The Tide Dragged In supersedes the dreaded ‘mumblecore’ label. Unfortunately, it’s debatable what it actually becomes.
Easily the film’s strongest suit in its cinematography. The naturalistic feel of most mumblecore cinema (if we have to call it that) can be seen here, as the color and lighting are really desaturated. Half the time it looks like the camera’s in some sort of drunken/hungover haze, and this is maintained even when we move from the wide open beach to indoors. So the visual palette of What The Tide Dragged In certainly appealed to me. It’s also the only time where the film actually knows what it wants to get and what atmosphere it’s trying to achieve, as it’s non-committal in just about every other area.
Genre-wise the film strays drastically. An atmospheric bit of exposition at the opening lets us know that some deeper folklore is at play, giving the film a folk-horror essence, but much of the rest of the film plays as a dreamlike drama about grief, as these two sisters go to a beach with their mother’s ashes and begin confronting their familial trauma. At times this drama was very engaging, as both actresses were natural and conveyed their grief in an interesting and human way, but the occasional sinister shots of the tide are a relatively half-arsed way of reminding the audience that there’s a supernatural background here. The pivots to horror, particularly the big swing towards it at the end, are really jarring as the scares aren’t particularly well-executed and they detract from the solid family drama beforehand.
Of course there is nothing wrong with a film that shifts between genres and tones like this does, and sometimes it results in something fantastic. In this respect, What The Tide Dragged In reminded me a fair bit of Inside No. 9, in both the genre-bending and the limitations it gives itself: a very small cast and a locked-off location. However, the problem with this comparison is that it highlighted the film’s major weakness – it’s too long.
What The Tide Dragged In feels like a fantastic 20-30 minute supernatural drama about grief stretched out to breaking point.
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78 minutes should be a blessedly tight and efficient runtime but What The Tide Dragged In feels like a fantastic 20-30 minute supernatural drama about grief stretched out to breaking point. This is apparently an issue of Valladares’s filmography in general, and it’s annoying to see great tight ideas become bloated and overworked like they are here.
The pace is much too slow in the first half and then bizarrely rushed once the film realises it’s got less than twenty minutes left on the clock. I can understand the slow pace in theory. The film’s naturalistic tendencies are trying to capture the strange lingering feeling of grief that persists in the immediate aftermath of death, and this is something the performances achieve almost singlehandedly. But in the long run, it’s just too much. By the halfway point, I was left wondering what else the film had to say or do, and there was still another half an hour to go.
I also kept expecting, and wanting, the film to explore its folkloric elements more. The first scene is really cool, where this backstory is explained to us through chilling narration, and yet it doesn’t play a part for the rest of the runtime. Chiléan folklore is not something we get the chance to see explored on film very often, so I was at least happy with the little morsel of it the film offers, but I was just wanting so much more of it.
What The Tide Dragged In is certainly an acquired taste, and there are many qualities to it that I appreciated and admired. I’d love to see a film with this dreamlike look again, and I’d love to see a film exploring grief in this way again too. When the film tries to be more than this, it ends up feeling undercooked and clumsy, and the ending was a massive letdown for me. It doesn’t deserve to be washed away by the tide, but I’m sure there are better films lining the shore.
WHAT THE TIDE DRAGGED IN PLAYED AT THE SOHO SOHOME HORROR FEST 2025
