Even flow: "River"

The Australian filmmaker Jennifer Peedom is carving out a very particular niche for herself. 2017's Mountain, an ode to the world's tallest peaks narrated by the eminently craggy Willem Dafoe, could hardly have been anything other than spectacular. Now Peedom follows it with the almost self-explanatory River, another film-symphony that reunites the same creative team: a prologue shows the returning Dafoe heading into the ADR suite with words from the novelist Robert Macfarlane and selected members of the Australian Chamber Orchestra. The ACO's score will actually prove to be one of River's strengths, as sombre and stirring as the great Danube. Elsewhere, renewed exposure only reveals Peedom's MO as a mix of the extremely vivid and the naggingly vague: what we're watching here is the Malickisation of the theatrical nature doc. To take the more vivid material first, Peedom has a gift for bending the screen into abstract shapes that take some (pleasurable) figuring out. Rivulets are observed breaking away from a waterway's main channels in complex, criss-crossing patterns, like the stitches of a jumper, or veins overlapping beneath the skin; the camera follows the twists and turns of a stream as it runs off and down a sheer cliff face. It's soon apparent this is the kind of production that's only become possible thanks to the evolution of drone technology. Some of the the starkest shots here are simple, static overviews, of canoeists tumbling over falls or lonely boatmen going about their daily business; of fields in various states of irrigation, and those golf courses that have popped up, altogether incongruously, amid the vast sands of the desert.

River gives good gawp, on the whole: every shot in these 76 minutes is a money shot, carefully collated by Peedom and editor Simon Njoo to point up the great spectacle of rivers. Or, indeed, any large body of water: the most surreal, Koyaanisqatsi-like image is of thousands of be-lilo-ed humans squeezed into a leisure park's overflowing wave pool. (There may be an implied rhyme between that image and a later one of plastic skimmed off the ocean's surface.) Yet what the film gains in scope, it often loses in precision: we get no indication of that waterpark's location, and though Peedom has dredged up some jawdropping footage of towns being flooded, there's equally no indication of this footage's source. A certain one-worldism is at play, which rather erases the differences in temperament between, say, the Ouse and the Ganges. The scientific specificity of the Attenborough school has been swept downriver, replaced by something loftier and more contentious. That's most obvious from Dafoe's narration, where every one of Macfarlane's choicer phrases ("lush rich silt", "upstream greed, downstream need") soon finds itself overwritten by something wispily grandiose. Are rivers really the basis of all human dreams? Does a river's "death" in the ocean begin its "resurrection"? (Are rivers religious?) The film has valid points to float about dams and all that damn plastic, but too much of River is allowed to wash over us like adland imagery and rhetoric. It dazzles at some of its turns, but it can't tell us anything we don't already know from decades of more prosaic eco-docs: that rivers are useful and nice to look at, that we should do whatever we can to stop factories, waste companies and drunk-at-the-wheel governments from dumping their shit in them.

River is now playing in selected cinemas, and available to rent via Prime Video, the BFI Player and Dogwoof on Demand.