Flow

It’s not hard to see, almost instantly, why this film won an Oscar. Putting aside the process of the film’s making, it truly has no limit to its visual beauty, and with a character design that leans toward realism and away from expression, still manages to signal more emotion per frame than you could have anticipated.

Straightforwardly, this doesn’t feel like a film about climate change. It does exist in that realm, but it really doesn’t belabour the point. Where it wants to stay is in the inter-relational space - what can we do for one another? What does community mean, and what does it cost? What can we know, and who can we empathise with?

The thesis seems to be - survival is important, but it can only be achieved with cooperation. Failure to work together is failure for all. Sometimes you will save the wrong people — sometimes, you will be unable to save the right ones.

It would be easy to fob this film off as some exercise in future dys/utopia, but the film has very little mileage in its message here. Instead, it seems as if it wants us to start discussing survival and community. Practical survival, and also the survival of our spirits, too.

Basically — it’s not always worth it to care, but we should care anyway.

I loved this film — it said volumes without a word, and had a very subtle but brilliant sense of humour. The sound design, as you might imagine had to be immaculate, and it was. There is no shortage of fear in this film, and I think that’s what sets it apart — the stakes feel high, without feeling too obvious.

The making of the film is also important to its success as a story — the film took five years to make in Blender, and had no storyboards, so the visual style feels like as much a video game as it does a film. There will be more and more production like this as more creatives learn this software, and it’s not an entirely bad thing — what the software can achieve is new and unique.

I can highly recommend the film, but it’s not a chill watch. It’s a perilous one, that will have you at the edge of your seat quite viscerally.