‘Suncoast’ Effectively Pulls At Heartstrings

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Suncoast, which screened at this year’s Sundance Film Festival, is a semi-autobiographical film from writer/director Laura Chinn.

In the film, Nico Parker is Doris, a teenager whose brother is dying of brain cancer at the same hospice as Terri Schiavo, whose controversial case sparked heated debate about the right to die in the early 2000s.

Doris is all but forgotten about by her mother (Laura Linney) who is completely preoccupied and trying to manage her own grief. Feeling lonely, Doris forms a friendship with Paul (Woody Harrelson) a widower who is protesting outside the hospice.

Doris tries to balance having a normal teenage life with the constant grief and pain caused by having a loved one with a terminal diagnosis, but at some point, the dam has to break.

In a terrific performance, Parker delivers pitch-perfect teenage awkwardness and simultaneously manages to show us the enormous emotional weight that Doris is under in every scene.

While there are parts of the film that feel specifically formulated to draw tears from the audience, the emotional impact of the story is effective and did make me well up in the end.