Leviathan

Directed by Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Véréna Paravel

(Not rated)

***

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This unusual but powerful documentary “offers not information but immersion,” said A.O. Scott in The New York Times. Set entirely on a New England fishing trawler, it essentially provides a fish’s-eye view of an ancient human activity, filling the screen with “90 minutes of wind, water, grinding machinery, and piscine agony.” Though the experience is “unnerving and sometimes nauseating,” it succeeds in capturing “the profound strangeness” of an encounter between species that we normally don’t think about. Images hurtle by—gulls, ropes, nets, and fish guts—and “you frequently have no idea what the heck you’re looking at,” said Farran Smith Nehme inthe New York Post. Yet “the adventurous souls” who get past the initial disorientation will be rewarded by a sense that a new style of storytelling is being born. Leviathan “explodes” the notion that a documentary must educate, said Melissa Anderson in The Village Voice. Instead of bringing order to its chosen subject, it “seizes us, never letting us forget just how disordered the world is.” And that might be “the greatest lesson any nonfiction film could teach us.”