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Review: “Flow”
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“Flow” is an animated film made in Latvia in 2024 for Hollywood small change — $3.5 million or so, a tiny crew led by writer-director Gints Zilbalodis.
It manages to combine extraordinary beauty with… well, I’m stumped. You see, the film isn’t just beautiful, it’s also mysterious and strange. I desperately want to see it again. Some movies affect me like that: they’ll roll around my head in fragments and until I see the film again, I won’t be able to think straight.
However the most astonishing and brilliant and effective thing about the movie is that there is no dialogue. There’s ambient sound, insects, bird-calls, a capybara snoring (yes, I know, I’ll get to the capybara), some music. But there is no dialogue because the heroes are animals who mostly behave like animals and sound like animals. No human animal needs to say “Miaow.”
We see the film mainly from the p.o.v. of a black cat — and we don’t know the name or whether he’s a she. There are human things everywhere — a handsome house full of carvings of the cat, an unfinished statue on a table surrounded by scrolls of wood and a drawing of the cat. The garden is full of statues of the cat and she walks among their tribute as a cat treats furniture, suitable to rub against and scratch.
