Styx ****
Dir: Wolfgang Fischer. With: Susanne Wolff, Gedion Oduor
Wekesa, Simon Sansone, Felicity Babao. 94 mins. Cert: 12A
Our creatives continue to form more imaginative and
compassionate responses to the issue of mass migration than our politicians.
Like recent TV conscience-prickers Home
and Don’t Forget the Driver, Austrian
director Wolfgang Fischer’s quietly gripping second feature immerses us in the
debate around freedom of movement; cinematically, it’s not unlike a clever
rethink of J.C. Chandor’s All is Lost.
That terrific survival drama exerted a form of white privilege by having Robert
Redford wrestle tempestuous seas on his lonesome, with no-one else around to
steal his thunder or close-ups. Fischer and co-writer Ika Künzel float the
notion there might be something more compelling and provocative yet in the
sight of a struggling sailor encountering others in far worse conditions. For
the earlier film’s collision of hulls, substitute a seismic and troubling
collision of worlds.
Assuming the helm here is an amateur yachtswoman, Rike
(Susanne Wolff), embarking on a planned recreational jaunt from Gibraltar to
Darwin’s beloved Ascension Island. A prologue establishes her ability to handle
a crisis as part of a paramedic team dispatched to a traffic accident; what
Fischer then dramatises, quite brilliantly, is how hard it is to maintain such
cool, rational positions once you’re adrift on your own, with finite space and
resources, and storms battering you from every side. When Rike encounters a
rusting vessel overloaded with African refugees off Cape Verde, she’s faced
with an entire continent’s quandaries. Does she heed the slow-moving
authorities’ terse communiques to maintain a distance, or lend the hand her
fellow travellers are pleading for? If the latter, for how long can she keep
that hand extended?
At any moment, we sense ship and film could tip either way. Vivid location shooting carries us some distance beyond platitudes, to a place where even the wind starts to sound indistinguishable from human howling. Yet Fischer’s resolutely responsible storytelling – leagues removed from any anti-migrant hysteria – anchors the film, as does Wolff’s intelligent, keenly felt performance as a capable, concerned citizen confronted by a situation that surely demands the same urgent collective action taken on land after multi-car pile-ups. No easy solutions bob into shot – there may be none – but the film retains a thriller’s hook in continually obliging us to assess Rike’s tough judgement calls, and may well endure as a representative work of this moment. Fischer literalises the turbulence we’re now navigating, and asks some Teutonically stern questions of our moral compasses.
Styx opens in selected cinemas from today.
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