Review: ‘Vincent Wants to Sea’

An anorectic, a guy with OCD and a Tourettes patient band together and head for the sea. It sounds like the punchline to a bad joke, but this is an affecting, sweet, funny film filled with characters you don’t typically see on film.

The film opens at a funeral where Vincent’s Tourette’s gets the better of him and his outbursts humiliate his father to such a degree that right afterward he’s shipped off to an institution. Dad’s an aspiring politician who hasn’t the time to concern himself with his son’s spasms and inappropriate language. Soon after arrival, Vincent meets skeletal Marie and OCD Alexander, and before long, the trio have stolen their therapist’s car and are heading down the autobahn.

They are headed for Italy and the sea, guided by a photograph of Vincent’s mother in which she looks happy. He wants to scatter her ashes there, which he carries in a small tin. Unwillingly forced together, Vincent’s father and therapist pursue them.

This is not a complex film, and viewers will most likely answer all the questions asked by the script well before the characters do. But it is sweet and charming, and the characters, despite their afflictions, are engaging and likeable. Screenwriter Fitz makes no attempt to educate us about the disorders, just shows us people learning to live with them. At one point Vincent attempts to explain his own personal hell as ‘There’s a clown in my head that shits between my synapses.’

What’s not to love?

7.5/10