In this immersive, disorienting documentary, we follow a crew of deep-sea fishermen as they trek into the dangerous waters off the coast of Massachusetts. But if you’re expecting a feature length episode of Deadliest Catch, well, that’s not what you’re going to get. Directors Castaing-Taylor & Paravel have used lightweight mobile cameras to put the viewer right in the action and there’s not a talking head in sight, just long unbroken shots of the chaotic reality of this often quite nightmarish reality. This is a divisive movie. I quite often find myself saying, “This movie isn’t for everyone” in my reviews; I think I’d go a step farther here and say, “This movie is for almost no one.” There’s a shot where the camera is obviously just placed at a corner of the deck and left running and we watch a fish head slide back and forth across the deck in a wash of bloody sea-water for several minutes. Later there’s a shot where we’re seeing a lot of chaotic activity reflected in a window of a large machine; it ultimately kind of becomes just abstract in a way, just a weird kaleidoscope of light and shadow while the soundtrack, which features no music, by the way, and maybe only two or three audible lines of dialogue, is just the deafening rumble of clanking machinery. Will you find yourself bored out of your mind watching this? At times. At other times, though, and the fish head scene is genuinely one of those for me, I found myself lulled into a kind of hypnotic reverie. And the climax of the film which features a long, long drone shot takes us into a flight of seagulls in a way that I found genuinely transcendent and it ultimately closes with an image that I won’t spoil, but that is something I’ve never seen before in a nature documentary and was really astonishing. I’ve heard people praise this movie as one of their most thrilling and immersive cinematic experiences and I get where they’re coming from; I’ve also heard people call this an incredibly boring and unpleasant cinematic experience and I get where they’re coming from. Honestly, I kind of feel like it’s a movie anyone who cares about cinema should at least try to watch; try to stick for at least the first twenty minutes and see if pulls you into its strange rhythms. It might not and I will admit that I found some portions of the movie very dull and, much as I hate this word in criticism, boring, but I’m really glad I watched it and it was, at its best, a really fascinating experience. I don’t see myself watching it again ever . . . unless I get the chance to see it on the big screen (which seems . . . shall we say UNLIKELY). I found the light and sound and image to be really immersive at home; I’d love to experience it in a theater where I can only imagine it might be genuinely overwhelming at times. Anyway, it’s a weird-ass little movie, like nothing I’ve really seen before and for lovers of cinema, a must-try, if maybe not a must-watch. 3 stars.
tl;dr – experimental, immersive deep-sea fishing documentary is challenging, not entirely successful, but very unique; you might not like it, but it’s absolutely worth a try. 3 stars.