In Need of Seawater – Film Review
Directed by Richard Yeagley
WARNING! This review contains SPOILERS!
In Need of Seawater is a film that draws you in slowly and before you realize it you’ve stopped watching a documentary and started participating in a life reflection. The film follows poet and writer Mark Anthony Thomas as he revisits the poems that shaped his early adulthood. The result is something deeply intimate. The film places us inside a small gathering at a friend’s home, but the poems take us on a journey through space and time. Every piece he performs is a doorway into his memories, losses, reckonings, and the constant search for identity in a country that often forces young Black men to carry more than their own ambitions.
What made this experience work for me was the immediate context he gives before each poem. When he describes meeting August Wilson and being told that poetry can be therapy, this moment is the real catalos for the film. The poems he shares—written between ages 21 and 24—show someone trying to sculpt himself out of inherited trauma, loneliness, longing, and pride. You feel all of that, and the film never distances you from those emotions. Instead, Richard Yeagley leans in with purposeful intimacy, shooting the room and the faces of those listening as if we are physically sitting in that circle with them.
Yeagley understands the vulnerability required to revisit the writings of a much younger self, especially when that younger self is grappling with systemic burdens, personal abandonment, sexuality, survival, and transformation. His film becomes a bridge, allowing Mark Anthony Thomas’s early voice to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with the man he became. When he pauses mid-poem to talk, to process, to share a story instead of a stanza, these moments really stood out to me. Those moments are just as valuable as the poetry itself.
The poems cover everything from sexuality and desire to poverty, adolescence, AIDS anxiety, the barbershop as sanctuary, the psychic weight of being a Black man in America, and the quiet prayer of finding peace. “Black Man’s Work,” for example, is one of those pieces that lands hard on your chest. The repetition of “Why must I…” reveals both exhaustion and resolve, and Yeagley’s decision to pair the performance with imagery that embodies the poem’s internal struggle makes the moment feel almost meditative. And when the actor steps in later—around the thirteen-minute mark—to perform within the poem, that bold intercut creates a layered emotional experience. It breaks the standard documentary rules, but it works because it honors both the poem and the man who wrote it.
From a technical standpoint, the filmmaking is confident, smooth, and unobtrusive. The camera glides like another guest in the room—never pulling attention but always catching emotional beats and reactions. The original music builds a warm, reflective sense of place without overpowering the poetry. And the experimental design—especially the actor-poet interplay—gives the film a dynamic shape that keeps it from becoming a simple reading session. Yeagley’s instincts to deviate mid-poem for additional context or parallel imagery elevate the film and push it closer to hybrid cinema. I appreciated how deliberate the pacing felt: the film slows when the poems ask for stillness, and it accelerates when the emotions rise.
This approach blurs the lines between documentary and narrative, and even dips into experimental territory, but it never loses its focus. Instead, that genre-blending feels like the most honest way to communicate someone’s interior life. Identity doesn’t follow a linear structure; memory doesn’t obey documentary rules; and poetry itself often wanders through time in search of meaning. The film mirrors that well.
I kept thinking about how deeply personal this project is, not just for Mark, but for younger viewers who will see pieces of themselves reflected back. In a world where social media encourages curated personas, where artificial intelligence blurs originality, and where isolation is increasingly normal, a film like In Need of Seawater reminds us that authenticity takes work. Vulnerability takes work. And reflection—real reflection—requires the courage to revisit the versions of ourselves we’d sometimes rather leave behind.
This film leans most comfortably into the documentary category, even though it breaks a number of documentary conventions. I would pair it with other films exploring personal growth, identity, cultural lineage, and the quiet reckoning that comes with stepping into adulthood. It carries the emotional weight and introspective tone of films centered on self-discovery, and I think audiences open to deeper conversations about race, art, trauma, love, and purpose will walk away moved. This is one of those short films that invites you to examine your own life.
In Need of Seawater is tender, raw, reflective, and quietly powerful. It makes you want to sit down with your younger self and ask, “What were you trying to tell me back then, and what have I forgotten to hear?”
And that’s what great art does—it makes you listen again.
