There’s no getting around the fact that Calum is a strange guy. We next see him and his daughter back at the hotel. First, she’s applying the same kind of lotion to his face that he used on hers earlier. Then we see him going through the completely bizarre ritual of removing the cast on his right arm himself.

That’s never a good idea and he has no idea what he’s doing. He’s soaking the cast and then using a pair of scissors to try to cut it. Except, of course, he ends up cutting his arm as he does so and blood starts to drip back into the bucket of water. Sophie is unaware of all of this — she’s holding a conversation with him from her bed, asking him first if breaking his wrist hurt. Calum replied that he didn’t even know it was broken at the time, which to me indicates that he was likely under the influence of something.

Sophie, meanwhile, is thumbing through a magazine called Girl Talk that includes a cover story on love. She asks her dad why he tells her mom that he loves her when on the phone with her. That’s a good question — it struck me as strange as well. Calum replies that we often say I love you to people like grandmother’s, aunts and uncles. Sophie replies “yeah, but they’re family.” Calum says, “well, your mom is family.” The response makes Sophie smile.

She seems to have love on her mind at this moment and then brings up an amusing linguistic confusion. She said that once when her mom had tried to call Calum, she told Sophie that she couldn’t put him on the phone because he was engaged at the moment. Sophie says she misunderstood for a while — she heard this way back when she was seven — and it made her happy to think that her dad might be engaged. Only later did she find out that the word has two different meanings.

It’s easy to come to the conclusion that Sophie is an unusually bright girl while her dad is a bit of a dumbass. But then he asks her how she’s getting along with “the book,” and she pulls out a rather large volume and thumbs through it quickly, saying that “it’s a bit hard to understand.” Calum tells her to stick with it, that he thinks she’ll really like it. From this, we can assume that he’s read it, so he’s not a neanderthal after all. Then again, the blood from his arm is dripping into the bucket as he says this.

We see them on a boat next, each staring into space. The scene then cuts with them both in the water to go diving. Calum criticizes Sophie for not making a “proper dive” off the boat. You know, I guess dads are supposed to hold their kids accountable for stuff like this, but I never did for my three children. They all learned to swim, but they seem to hold a grudge against me for never teaching them how to ride a bike. So I guess it’s possible if Sophie doesn’t learn to dive she might be more annoyed by that later in life than for having him criticize her like this now. Sometimes a parent just can’t win.

Anyway, while they’re having this mini dispute, Calum tosses a scuba mask at Sophie and she doesn’t see him doing it — the mask quickly sinks out of sight. We see Calum dive after it, but it’s a hopeless task.

Back on the boat, a couple is having a conversation in Spanish while Calum and Sophie seem emotionally distant. Sophie has a wet suit on, Calum is struggling to put on his. Finally Sophie breaks the tension by saying “you know I didn’t see you toss the mask,” then she gets up close to him and apologizes for losing it, saying she knows it was expensive. She rests her head on his lap — in addition to being bright, Sophie is also emotionally intelligent.

Calum half-apologizes for his behavior, saying that he’s just tired. He asks Sophie to go find the camera. He continues to struggle, then an instructor steps forward and gives him a tip, to use a small plastic bag to make it easier to get feet into the suit. The two have a short conversation that includes the instructor saying that he has a baby on the way, to which Calum offers congratulations. The instructor says he planned to have kids after 40, but it didn’t turn out that way (as someone who had my first kids at 42, it’s not a plan I’d recommend.)

Then Calum says the most startling line of the movie — that he was surprised to have lived past 30. The movie lingers on this line, placing nearly a minute of silence after it.

I don’t believe Sophie was in earshot of that statement, which raises an interesting point about the film’s point of view: if we are to assume that the movie is told from Sophie’s perspective, what are we supposed to make of the scenes where she isn’t around? Did these scenes actually happen or did Sophie invent them after the fact?

The next shot is of Sophie talking directly into the camera, telling a tall tale of her diving adventure that included a sea horse wrapping itself around her finger and an octopus ending up on her head. Then she turns the focus back to Calum, who she tells us was supposed to have a diving license for this activity, but doesn’t have one: “he told a porky pie,” she says, which is British slang for a lie.

This once again raises the question of whether Calum has the maturity to be a father to Sophie — but it also puts into our heads the question of truth. How much of what we are seeing and hearing should we take a face value?