Dealing with fragile masculinity: The Son and the Sea
- Zekican Sarısoy
- Sep 28
- 4 min read
Director Stroma Cairns’ debut feature film The Son and the Sea (2025) had its world premiere in Toronto and was later screened in the New Directors section of the 73rd San Sebastián Film Festival on September 21. Carrying all the excitement of a first film, this road story also bears the sincerity of Cairns’ sensitivity when approaching human nature. While tackling male culture, male companionship, or camaraderie, the film goes beyond simply reproducing masculinity and instead captures, from a strikingly precise angle, the possibility of another kind of “masculinity.”
Editor: Tuba Büdüş
Two friends, Jonah and Lee, set out on a journey to the north of Scotland. Jonah hopes to escape the chaos of London and find purification through the trip. Along the way, they encounter Charlie, who is almost deaf and also happens to be visiting the area. In the wild, frenetic atmosphere of the North, the film explores the dimensions of a different kind of friendship.
Fragile masculinity in today’s narrative world has turned into something that bypasses all the stops where we should actually pause and reflect. Stories, at the end of the day, began to create “weak male” character types only to stand in opposition to the “strong male” figures. But what was fragile masculinity really, and is this truly it? Instead of a masculinity that destroys everything in its pursuit of strength and power, what did we actually find? Certainly not a world where being emotional, romantic, easygoing, or humble is stripped away. Yet our narratives have drifted somewhat in that direction. In fact, looked at inversely, we’ve ended up close to the same old depiction that, for years, cut emotional women off from life while portraying strong women as devoid of emotions.
In trying to “do something” for queer storytelling, our cinema has filled itself with films that render their subjects spotless, as if they had fallen from heaven’s gate mere minutes before, stripping them of their complexity. A narrative cannot be thought of independently from time and space-but yet perhaps this is exactly what we have forgotten when writing characters. By calling a film “timeless,” what often lingers is its endurance across years, or the pleasure of its associations. But what we overlook is the ability of those characters to shape the nature and spaces they inhabit. That is often where Hamlet’s magic lies. Hamlet’s world was one of constant blur and insecurity: the ghost of his father appeared, intrigues plagued the court, and everyone grew suspicious of one another. This intensity detached the characters from a normal sense of time. Hamlet famously says: “Time is out of joint.” The flow of events no longer proceeds naturally: the death of the father—or perhaps his nonexistence—his mother’s hasty remarriage, the games of power—all disrupt the order of time. The characters live, or attempt to live, within this “broken time.”
The Son and the Sea, knowingly or not, places the space-character relationship into a reciprocal bond where neither can exist without the other. Instead of cutting down a tree, it chooses to embrace it. Instead of abandoning a person with all their contradictions outside, it chooses to look at them. It creates a world in which people live, but also another world in which everything else lives inside people. It asks: is it possible to suddenly set out on a journey? To go to unknown places? To dare form a relationship with strangers that is independent of the space they occupy in this world? I said “dare,” because even within the infinity of this world, our own worlds have limits. Crossing to the other side of the line may not mean taking big leaps, but perhaps just letting ourselves fall for a moment from the wall on which we are suspended.
The film’s technical choices strive for this very effect. Cinematography by Ruben Woodin Dechamps often lingers on characters’ gazes into the void, attempting to understand what they see in the midst of beauty. Set in a harsh season, the film uses the sounds of nature at their most intense. The crashing of powerful waves against rocks or the pelting of rooftops by rainstorms create a striking allegory within the characters’ world. In the end, it pushes us to think about accepting weaknesses, fears, and difficult pasts—or about how even acceptance itself can be a form of strength. Consciously or not, through its protagonists, the film invites viewers to test this kind of courage.
Cairns, of course, is not concerned with explicitly telling a queer story or crafting a feminist agenda. This film does not ground its existence in such an intention. Yet it sketches such authentic characters! While trying to grasp the nature of identity, it could easily have taken the shortcut of exploiting a universe of opposites. Instead, the story bundles its characters together and sends them on a journey. In showing us multiple forms of fragile masculinity, each character reveals aspects of male worlds that rarely come into close contact with other men. For instance, the film never makes it its mission to show that a group of men inevitably cause an uproar when together. With the deaf character Charlie, it instead emphasizes the effort of befriending and understanding. The film softens the hierarchical structure between the strongest and weakest that so often governs the accidents of men coming together-the visible and invisible boundaries blur. Thankfully, things become a little unclear there. Precisely in what cannot be seen, a sense of closeness begins to form with the viewer. For when such a perspective develops, it dissolves the unequal relationship—whether explicit or implicit-between “us men” and “you spectators.”
This review was first published on September 26, 2025, at filmhafizasi.com as Turkish.