Seahorse
**Seen at the 2026 Atlanta Film Festival
Nola (played by writer-director Aisha Evelyna) has not seen her father in years. It’s jarring when, one day, she sees him outside of the restaurant she’s now working at. He (Joseph Marcell) is pushing a shopping cart, and going through the trash; he is homeless. Nola is prone to having mental breakdowns at times of tremendous stress, and throughout “Seahorse,” we get the sense that her father is at the center of it. Their unexpected reunion is going to give her enormous stress, but is it possible she also finds closure? By the end of Evelyna’s film, it feels like she has, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t plenty of stress ahead.
In March 2022, my mother had been in memory care for about ten months. It had been an up-and-down transition, but the facility had been patient with her. It didn’t help that she had not really been taking any medication, and trying to get her to take some was not easy. Somewhere around the middle of the month, her and I had as brutal a shouting match as we’d ever had, and I left. I would not reach out to her, or see her, for a month. It was one of the lowest moments I’d had in the previous few years adjusting to the new reality of her cognitive decline with dementia. When I did return, her meds had been sorted out, and we never had a moment like again. There is a flashback to Nola and her father that feels like was the breaking point in their relationship. They’d tried to put together a normal existence after Nola’s mother passed away, but it wasn’t in the cards. That is no doubt why her father’s reintroduction into her life in adulthood is so jarring. He tries to be the caring father, but they struggle to coexist in one another’s lives. These moments in “Seahorse” reminded me of that moment with my mother, especially when the father, Cyrus, is in urgent care. It’s hard to feel like a relationship can come back from that, even when we’re all our parents have at the end of their lives.
A lot of drama in the film also comes from Nola’s job at the restaurant. It is just now opening, and run by her best friend, Adelaide (Ruth Goodwin), and her husband, Rob (Brett Donahue). Nola- who is the sous chef- missed opening night because of a breakdown, and it’s caused tension between her and Adelaide, who’s been through the worst of things with her, we will find out later in the film. There is a sympathetic ear in Emile (Alden Adair), a street food vendor who’s not far from the restaurant, but even that only goes so far. There is some beautifully modulated character work in “Seahorse” from several of the actors, but the most impactful moments happen between Nola and Cyrus. It doesn’t feel like many people are in a good place by the end of the film, but Nola feels like she’s on the way. This was an exercise in empathy that I was grateful to see.
