“It’s Therapy For Me”: Nico Parker & Laura Chinn On Navigating Coming Of Age Alongside End Of Life In Suncoast

We're all familiar with coming of age stories — we watch a protagonist (usually a teenager) navigate an identity crisis, eventually discovering what it means to grow up and officially enter 'adulthood' (often with a punchy soundtrack and colourful set design in tow). The new film Suncoast has all of these but with a sprinkle of something we've been seeing in teen shows lately — death.

Suncoast follows a teen girl called Doris (played by Thandiwe Newton's daughter Nico Parker of The Last of Us) who grapples with high school and an absent mother, played by Laura Linney (Mystic River, Love Actually) after her dying brother is placed into end of life care for brain cancer.

The filmmaking debut of Laura Chinn, Suncoast is something that's deeply personal to her — because it's based on her own life. The film is a semi-autobiographical retelling of her own experiences as a teen, which saw her brother moved into hospice care, which he was unknowingly sharing with Terri Schiavo. Shiavo was a woman in a persistent vegetative state that spurred a controversial and highly publicised court battle in Florida, USA that questioned not just one's right to live, but also one's right to die. Through her real-life experiences, Chinn says that the event forced her to confront the ethics of humanity, as well as grappling with the anticipated death of her own brother.

For Chinn, the film has almost acted as a form of closure for the real-life loss of her brother. "It's so healing to write about stuff you think no one else has gone through," she tells Refinery29 Australia. "You think you're the only person and then people come up to you... and you realise how connected we all are."

"It's sort of therapy for me," she adds. "And getting so much healing and connection out of it and closure from writing about it and seeing that it's a very universal thing to go through."

The film, which also features Woody Harrelson as an eccentric protestor who's grieving the loss of his own wife, floats the question of ethics when it comes to euthanasia and end of life. For Nico Parker, who has previously captured hearts in her stellar performance in The Last of Us, this is part of the beauty of the film.

"I feel like it's such a typical teen thing to get tunnel vision as to what's exactly in front of you," Parker tells Refinery29 Australia. "Whether that's what dress am I going to wear for prom or my brother is dying, whichever one was directly in front of her, I wanted her to be feeling that to its fullest extent and to how intensely you can feel it as a teenage girl and growing up."

While the film's subject matter is unabashedly dark at times, there's also a teen sense of colourful wonder sprinkled throughout. "I tried not to fuse every scene with a depressing undertone because I wanted it to be like, when she's happy, she's happy. When she's sad, she's sad," Parker says of her performance. "I didn't want the two to consistently be intertwining because I think that's so true of being a teenager — you can be all these different extremes at one time."

"It felt almost like two different movies," Chinn adds. "There's a teen comedy going on, then there's this family drama. It's how do you infuse both of those and make the tone work?"

At times, the film can feel a bit confronting, especially if you've experienced loss personally. For viewers who might be able to see their own lives reflected in the story, Chinn hopes that the story can help show how grief can show up in many different ways. "My intention with the storytelling was to show as many different versions of grief as possible," she explains. "Losing someone is so devastating and your reaction is so natural, whatever comes out of you. I didn't want to make it seem like there was a correct way and a wrong way. I just wanted to show all the ways."

"Hopefully, people watch that movie who have dealt with loss and be like, 'Yeah, I did that', or 'My sister acted like that and my mum acted like that'," she says. "There's no correct way to deal with something so massive."