SUBLIME VISION: FLOW (2024, co-wri & dir by Gints Zilbalodis, 85mns, Latvia/France)

Okay. Cinema is gonna be all right. (Writer exhales, wipes beads of sweat from brow).

The animated dialogue-less FLOW tells the mysterious story of a small cat who, along with a Capybara, Golden Retriever, Lemur, and Secretarybird, must stay alive on a sailboat while the entire world seems to experience a second Noah's flood.

While this might sound like a new age MADAGASCAR, it is utterly singular. Nominated for both BEST ANIMATED FEATURE and BEST INTERNATIONAL FILM this year, the movie commits to an idea that becomes an existential journey into the soul of life itself.

The animals DON'T speak or sing. Barring a few heightened moments (could a Secretarybird or Capybara really pilot the rudder of a sailboat?), they seem to behave exactly as their species would act. They communicate and regard each other in barks, meows, clicks, squawks, growls, and chirps.

Wait, how are we going to survive this never explained flood?

As much meditative prayer as narrative, the movie's structure mirrors its title. It opens with the orphan cat regarding a puddle of water then realizing, after a herd of elk stampede by, that an unexplained flood means it has to fight for immediate survival.

The rise in water levels (which continues for most of the movie) is never explained. Neither is the absence of humans though the animals move through abandoned homes, Venetian like cities, strange rock cleaving temples which all confirm human endeavor.

Mysterious scenes like this that hint at (never seen) human endeavor feel almost like the most mysterious video game you’ve never played…

Could it be a climate change incident mixed with a strange second Noah's flood? The motley crew of animals (who would not naturally all live in the wild of any one continent) form a ragtag Ark in the hull of their beat up sailboat.

Spiritual overtones and undertones inflect the entire movie. From the beautiful music and sound design to transcendent scenes where a strange mutated whale-fish comes to the rescue and an animal ascends into an aurora borealis. 

Nothing is ever explained or spelled out. And the spirituality, if that's the right word, is a "God suffused through nature" transcendentalism.

The entire movie puts the viewer into a state of wonder, humility, awe, and speculation.

If moviemakers like Zilbalodis continue to successfully execute visions like this and financiers continue to fund real cinematic experiments like this then cinema has at least another chapter left in it.

God willing, more.

Craig Hammill is the founder.programmer of Secret Movie Club