Leviathan

Taking us aboard a huge trawler setting sail from New Bedford, Massachusetts, for a week-long fishing expedition, this documentary by Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Véréna Paravel — already a classic — achieves the impossible: allowing us not just to watch but also to become embedded in the scene, transforming the film into a genuine experience in the most literal sense of the word possible. Throughout its 87-minute runtime, Leviathan (with its utterly unfamiliar shooting angles, radical use of sound, and lack of dialogue) feels like a return to primal, pre-civilizational experience before the emergence of speech, before the appearance of subjective entities in the world. Here, hundreds of fish being chopped to bits, flocks of birds flying over roiling waves, otherworldly cries of the sea itself, groaning pieces of metal, and human bodies repeating the same mechanical motions over and over are made the core musical instruments of an imposing symphony comprising images, resonances, and inscrutable emotions. Cinema that is both absolutely physical and spiritual at once.