There's no music. No special effects. No transitions or complex camera work. In a nutshell, that's what makes Sea Wall deviant from film standard and superior in quality to same. It's really great. After all, if you can't have a moving and believable performance without those things, what do you have at all, really? Not much.

"Sea Wall" is the experience of watching a relatively average man pull memories from his head like bits of string. Alex leaps around from story to story; sometimes he'll talk about how weepy he is when watching ER. Or scuba-diving, visits to the market, and the spiritual head-to-head he repeatedly had with his father-in-law. But you really begin to feel for Alex. Sort of like he's this guy you knew back in school and just happened to catch up with again after several years. And you can tell that he's hiding something very deep and very personal. By the time I got to the real sucker-punch reveal I was so entirely engrossed in Scott's performance that my breath kind of caught. Hearing him express his grief and emptiness in such a closely-guarded, broken way was literally one of the most tragic pieces of film I've ever sat through. It's very easy to see why Alex is in as many pieces as he is after that half-hour of dialogue, and it's a real feat considering that we started off knowing nothing about his life, nothing about his motivations, and nothing about his struggles and personal void. At one point Alex attempts to share with everyone what "the cruelest thing he ever did to another person" was. And even though he starts, there's this complete and total void, because he never actually tells us what it is. And yet it's something that everyone watching knows. Everyone knows exactly what his cruelest words were without being told. It's an incredibly unusual moment for viewers. Very chilling, really.