Biopics and films based on real events have already proven time and time again that reality sometimes tells the most beautiful stories. Penguin Bloom, the latest Netflix film released yesterday with Glendyn Ivin directing, is no exception to the rule and delivers the poignant story of Sam, a woman paralyzed following an accident, who finds a taste for life thanks to a young magpie taken in by the Bloom family: Penguin. Filmed with touching delicacy and simplicity, Sam's true story follows the distress of a woman and a mother, without ever falling into pathos, to deliver an inspiring message of hope.
The chilling distress of fear and guilt
Penguin Bloom begins with images of the past, those of a perfect life in a perfect family, through the sadly distorted point of view of Noah, the Blooms' eldest son. Then comes the drama of a lifetime, a chilling tragedy that plays out off-camera, making us imagine the worst with dread. Sam Bloom (played by Naomi Watts) will emerge paralyzed from the legs and unable to return to his "before" life. 
If the bird taken in by the family finds its place in the story a little later, the whole first part depicts the distress of a woman who sees her life escape her, the distress of a mother who can no longer be one. The family pain of the children and the helpless husband Cameron (played by Andrew Lincoln) crystallizes around the eternal human question: why me? Why did it have to fall on us? In a desire for understanding, rationality in the face of inexplicable chance, guilt gradually sets in because the only answer we find is "it's me, it's my fault". This guilt and sense of injustice that gnaws at Noah and Sam will find in Penguin, the magpie fallen from a tree and saved by the elder who can no longer fly, a saving remedy. By saving a life, these two broken beings will find meaning in theirs, gradually accepting each on their own their emotions and the help of their loved ones. Then follows a long journey of repair of body and mind, where we discover little by little the life of Sam and its contradictions in the face of disability: between fear, sadness, anger and mourning of his old life, the courage found by this woman thanks to her passion and her family forces admiration.
Common places easily forgiven by the delicacy of the image
If Penguin Bloom uses commonplaces already seen and reviewed (the universe of the sea, symbol of freedom and strength, Cam's photographs that immortalize moments that seem lost forever, the metaphor of flight), they find their place thanks to the simplicity and purity of the message and the camera, which deliver in a rare delicacy the moments of life of this cracked family. 
While the treatment of Penguin's character could have fallen into scripted facilities often worn out by other films of the genre, the bird never takes itself for what it is not and very rightly shares the screen with Sam, each growing in symbiosis with and thanks to the other. The sincerity of this true story is felt at every moment, as much in the moments of failure so human and legitimate as in the successes that transcend them. If we regret that the principles of verticality and horizontality are not sufficiently exploited in the image to render this effect of mourning the "standing", the accentuation of previously innocuous gestures and words strongly transmit the courage of change and the acceptance of this upheaval. The soft and very natural lights, the interpretation always right and the sincerity that emerges make Penguin Bloom a touching film not without flaw, but which captures on the fly a moment of life of the most difficult with a moving and poetic simplicity. A beautiful film to discover without further delay on Netflix.
