Have you ever thought about how unsettling it would be to be lost out at sea in the middle of the night? The dark waves churning and slopping against your head as you try to keep afloat, the water rushing into your ears, your nostrils, your mouth.

Between the sloshing noises you may hear squawking somewhere. Is it overhead, or far away? North, west, east, south? We've lost all sense of direction by now. And like a passing helicopter that can't land to pick you up, the flocks of gulls merely carry forward, ignoring your plight as they have the freedom of flight.

Under your feet you sense the endless depths below, a world imbued in darkness where all manner…

Leviathan, Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Verena Paravel’s experimental documentary following a nocturnal commercial fishing trip in the North Atlantic, has received near-universal critical praise for its immersive, visceral and haunting quality. Based on the gushing hyperbolic reception I was expecting a work of earth-shattering brilliance but unfortunately I struggled to share in the enthusiasm.

Maybe my tastes in cinema are far more conservative than I had originally thought but I was disinterested throughout this murky, repetitive and disorienting trip. Whilst I appreciate the filmmakers’ intent - such as the way the cameras move with the motion of nature and the toil of the fishermen - I was left nonplussed by the experience. Perhaps something is lost when watching it on the…

73/100

Not as brilliantly composed as the first half of Sweetgrass, but it doesn't much matter—the images picked up on the fly are among the most astonishing ever captured. Still, I do think claims have been a bit overstated, in that this is really just a much artier (which is to say, more abstract) version of unmediated nature docs like Microcosmos and Winged Migration, with some human labor thrown in to excite the left. Personally, I find that allowing people beyond the periphery of the frame—I'm okay with the bravura opening sequence and its briefly glimpsed arms and shoulders—breaks the spell, if only because we're so hard-wired to study the faces of our own species in search of behavioral clues;…

Whenever you call any work of art unique, time is bound to catch up on you and make you take back your words. But I'm going to go ahead and call Leviathan unique anyway.

Documentary makers Castaign and Paravel create a haunting and estranging vision of the harsh life on board a fishing vessel. In dark and grim colours they paint pictures so alien and bizarre that they come across more as surreal than grim reality. With muffled and muted sounds from the real world trying to break through in the background the pictures we are shown bob and weave from abstract surrealism to tangible realism, creating something akin to a fisherman's waking dream.

There is method in this madness…

For all the talk about consciousness, environment, and labour that is getting tossed around with this one – all of which, don’t get me wrong, are among the major themes here – the project seems to be first and foremost an attempt at recalibrating viewers’ sense of gravity. Functioning as a quasi-sequel to Michael Snow’s landmark (pun kind of intended) La région centrale, Leviathan thrashes the camera erratically in any and every which direction; space is spun, flipped, and exploded to often vertiginous effect, to the point where I felt like I was going to fall out of my seat on a few occasions (oh how I would kill for an IMAX screening). One could even say that Castaing-Taylor and…

Non-narrative really means just that in some cases.

I was expecting more from this film. I was hoping for something to the tune of Ron Fricke. Some visuals that would compensate for the lack of plot. Instead I got cameras on a boat. The cameras film and the people on the boat do their jobs. It's just a voyeur film about people fishing in the Atlantic. I guess that makes it experimental and brilliant but it didn't do anything for me. I was bored. I didn't feel like I was watching something new. I have seen similar ideas fleshed out just not into a full 90 minute feature.

I learned more about myself than I did about the fishing boat.…

One of 2012's key films for sure, but translates very poorly into words. It's amusing that nearly every review (and Castaing-Taylor/Paravel themselves) finds it easier to agree on a sonic correlative — metal, the musical choice of the fishing vessel's employees. The film's a series of extended solos and relentless crescendoes, beginning with a 15 minute "shot" seamlessly stitched together from disparate units, a trick Brian De Palma might envy. The first three minutes are total disorientation — what's that flashing light? is it dark because it's night or because we're indoors? how much space are we looking at anyway? — and even when Leviathan becomes visually legible, it has shots I've literally never seen before. The technical possibilities raised…

Some systems, for all their ruthless efficiency and invisible control, seem guided only by chaos, like an anthill teeming with activity, its scurrying agents adhering to patterns we can’t perceive. Leviathan, an experimental documentary by Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Verena Paravel, concerns a system whose very functionality seems incomprehensible: here we bear witness, with an unprecedented degree of intimacy, to a commercial fishing operation so wholly in thrall to the churning agitations of its environment that nature itself has not only the power but the will to topple it. Fish are not so much heaved the sea as they are wrenched from it, jerked with the force of market pressure, the hulking mass of bodies at work made as much a…

What do you get if you put an art house film crew on a deep sea trawler and have them shoot an almost dialogue-free, immersive documentary that feels a bit like what would emerge if Werner Herzog directed a season of The Deadliest Catch with the eye of Terrence Malick? Well, I’m sure that was the idea behind the film that became 2012’s Leviathan, a truly trippy doc that’s as arresting visually as it devoid of a structured narrative, cameras being passed freely between ship and film crew to capture all the grit, sweat, entrails, and flotsam of a fishing boat in full swing. I ultimately found the film less engaging than I’d hoped, playing less as a meditation on…

So in one of the stranger logs I’ll ever do on here, allow me to set the scene as follows:

While watching this yesterday I had the passing thought, “wow this movie feels like how the album Frozen Niagara Falls sounds!” then had the half-joking thought, “someone should try and Dark-Side-of-the-Moon this with Frozen Niagara and see what happens” then, some time later, had the quite serious thought “fuck it I guess I’ll be the one to do it” and then I did it. 

And folks??

I’VE GOTTA SAY, IT WORKS REAL DAMN WELL. 

I understand this is mildly sacreligious since the sound design is one of the best parts of the original, but as A/V experiments go, the result…

An experimental nightmare of a documentary, Leviathan worked on me like strong hypnosis. The film begins with abstract dark visuals that mean nothing but mystery. Quickly, the sound of the sea and machinery and loudspeakers overwhelm and the hypnosis is in full effect. The visuals become more and more clearer, meaning grittier, slimier, holier, grander. The film is shot on GoPro in a way that makes the commercial fishing industry feel like an alien massacre. It is gorgeously gross, but entrancing all the while. Long takes allow the audience to absorb the wonders and horrors on screen as if the audience were experiencing it first hand. Nature and humanity and technology come together on an epic scale, relentlessly tossing the…