Sundance review: 'Suncoast' brilliantly captures a girl's growth and a family's grief in the shadow of a national protest

Writer-director Laura Chinn mines her family’s tragedy in the tragicomedy “Suncoast,” and strikes dramatic gold with this heartbreaking story of a teen coping with impending grief on the outskirts of a national controversy.

Nico Parker stars as Doris, a 17-year-old girl living in Clearwater, Fla., circa 2005, with her abrasively forward mother (Laura Linney) and her older brother, Max (Cree Kawa) — who is bedridden and mostly unresponsive, after years of brain cancer. It’s reached the point where Max is near death and needs hospice care to see him comfortably to the end.

Mom, convinced that the hospice nurses aren’t doing enough for Max, decides to sleep on a cot alongside her son. This leaves Doris alone at home — which turns out to be an opportunity for her to host parties and make instant friends with the popular girls at school. It also puts Doris on the radar of Nate (Amarr), one of her school’s cutest boys.

Doris also sees what’s going on outside the hospice: Hundreds of Christian protesters, demanding that another patient in the hospice — Terri Schiavo — not have her feeding tube removed, as per her husband’s wishes. (True story: Chinn’s brother was at the same hospice as Schiavo, whose case became a cause celebre for the religious right, a political football for both George W. and Jeb Bush, and a case study of conservatives being quite happy with government meddling in private medical decisions.) 

Doris befriends one protester, a widower named Paul (played by Woody Harrelson), who’s a more empathetic character than the shorthand view of protesters might lead one to expect.

That’s one of the beauties of Chinn’s film, is that she doesn’t depict anyone as cardboard stereotypes. Mom is overbearing, but also deeply caring and wracked with self-doubt. Doris’ high school friends (Daniella Taylor, Ella Anderson and Ariel Martin) are shallow and occasionally clueless, but they’re also supportive and caring. And Doris herself is sometimes thoughtful and wise, other times self-centered and self-pitying.

Linney gives a powerhouse performance as Doris and Max’s mom, who’s been fighting for her kids for so long she has trouble accepting that she’s at the point where she has to let both of them go — one to her independence, the other to his long-expected death.

Young Parker — who five year ago made her movie debut as Colin Farrell’s daughter in Tim Burton’s “Dumbo” — gives a star-making performance. (It’s in her blood: Her mom is Thandiwe Newton, and her dad is the director Ol Parker.) She captures Doris’ anger at her mom, grief over her brother, and her first faltering steps toward adulthood. At 19, Parker shows in “Suncoast” she has a bright future ahead. 

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‘Suncoast’

★★★★

Screening in the U.S. Dramatic competition at the 2024 Sundance Film Festival. Rated R for teen drug and alcohol use, language and some sexual references. Running time: 109 minutes.

Screens again: Monday, January 22, 9 a.m., The Ray, Park City; Wednesday, January 24, 6 p.m., Rose Wagner Performing Arts Center, Salt Lake City; Thursday, January 25, 6 p.m., Redstone Cinemas 7, Park City. Also available online via the Sundance portal, Thursday-Sunday, January 25-28.

The movie is scheduled to begin streaming February 9 on Hulu.