Dir: Alejandro Amenabar
Starring: Javier Bardem, Belen Rueda, Lola Duenas, Mabel Rivera, Celso Bugallo.

"The Sea Inside" tells the true story of Ramon Sampedro (played here by Javier Bardem), who was paralysed from the neck down when young after a diving accident and spent many of the next thirty years attempting to die in dignity according to the law, before he died with the assistance of friends in 1988, aged 50. The film takes the form of the biography of the final years of his life, showing us the spirit that has kept him mentally so alive, by turning witty, affectionate to those around him, sardonic, concerned, and always above self-pity. While the theme is simple, the story self-announced and the end, naturally, inevitable, "The Sea Inside" explores the theme by showing the various ways that the people in Ramon's Galician community react to him and his desire to die. It is odd to think that the family in question gave their approval to the film, since some of them are portrayed as highly fallible, and at one point they find themselves criticised on TV by an ecclesiastical figure for not loving Ramon enough; the portrait of his elder brother Jose (Celso Bugallo) an aging fisherman with traditionalist views, is particularly hard at times, while we understand that the brother never himself mentions that his life has been changed by the need to stay at home to look after his brother, giving up a sailing career. All the cast members are convincing in their complementary ways, without falling into mannerism or predictability. Ramon's stoic and quietly affectionate sister-in-law is particularly memorable, and typically it is the others who express the despair or extremes of emotion that he himself keeps contained.

The film begins with the meeting of Sampedro with a lawyer who has taken on his case to take his own life, played by Belen Rueda, who it is revealed has chosen the case because she herself suffers from a debilitating disease that with time will overcome her; while she researches her subject's past she is aware that her own memory could fade away. As news of his campaign spreads, a local DJ, Rosa (Lola Duenas) comes to meet her, and though at first he derides her need to give pity to him to fill a void in her own life, they become close friends.

Film-makers set on difficult social themes can find themselves beset with a double-barrelled problem, how to make their content fit to what is essentially a popular idiom, and how to avoid its being absorbed in that idiom, turning into the obscure illumination of life-enhancing cinema. What this amounts to is a question of taste rather than moral fibre; Amenabar has made a film which works out as more than an accommodation of the two instincts. Though some would find the imaginative sequences in which we see Sampedro getting up and launching himself from the window - transformed into the flying motion of the camera that takes him to the sea - or making love, too close to commercial taste, it doesn't follow that a film in the style of Ingmar Bergman would have popularised the film, and hence the issue of euthanasia. The film curtails the potential for melodrama in a way that suits the protagonist. Amenabar avoids other easy ways to dramatize the situation, limiting the polemics in the film to a short and funny encounter with a stunningly tactless Jesuit, himself paraplegic, their heated discussion taking place up a flight of stairs when the priest's attendants fail to lift him up them. In one of the more telling lines of the film, Sampedro retorts that life is a right, not an obligation, a secular reasoning for which the priest is not wholly prepared. There is also a brief encounter with the magistrates who are shown to be indifferent to the case, throwing it and Sampedro's written statement out of court without a hearing. The emotional entanglements are vivid and distinct, the mothering care of... a young woman in search of guidance and approval looking for one kind of love, the older... who investigates his past in order to find out more about her client comes to understand him in a different way. With each, we see Sampedro's aversion to facile sympathy and gratuitous pity merging into something deeper. The most obvious point of comparison is with "Million Dollar Baby." While that film opened up the euthanasia debate in the perspective of the American dream, the resulting ambiguities left it unclear whether the young girl was a victim of a prejudice in dying: she has at least been a winner, and so can accept dying, but if the desire for success did not press on her so hard, would she have thought of her life as worthless, falling into line with the unforgiving distinction between winners and losers? "The Sea Inside" is of course a wholly different kind of film, announcing its theme from the first moment, biography rather than drama; it has the advantage of seeming more in control of the issues that enter its drama, its sympathy with the protagonist less a way of taking sides than a refusal of a priori judgements. While the director has clearly sympathy with his central character, the perspectives of all those around him are left open rather than unanswered. The moment of death is filmed without sideways glances at metaphor or fantasy, with Bardem speaking directly to camera as he swallows poisoned water through a straw. This film ends with the real videotape of Sampedro's final moments.