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France, United Kingdom, United States · 2012
1h 27m
Director Véréna Paravel
Starring Declan Conneely, Johnny Gatcombe, Adrian Guillette, Brian Jannelle
Genre Documentary
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Set aboard a hulking fishing vessel as it navigates the treacherous waves off the New England coast. The very waters that once inspired Moby Dick, the film captures the harsh, unforgiving world of the fishermen in starkly haunting, yet beautiful detail.
The result is a self-conscious tone poem concocted from oblique camera angles, shots held longer than it takes a tadpole to reach maturity and nighttime images enhanced with a psychedelic glow. An alternate title for it might be "David Lynch, Gone Fishin'."
The New York Times by A.O. Scott
Leviathan, a product of the Sensory Ethnography Lab at Harvard, offers not information but immersion: 90 minutes of wind, water, grinding machinery and piscine agony.
New York Post by Farran Smith Nehme
The adventurous souls who stick with it, however, will find head-spinning images and a cumulative impact that does, in fact, amount to a story.
The experience of Leviathan is wholly singular, without context, enveloping and immersive. In some ways, it might very well be the most terrifying picture of the year.
The first and only piece of advice needed on one’s way to the fishing pond is this: Bring your patience. Not surprisingly, the same could be said to a viewer of this slow-building but riveting experimental collage.
Village Voice by Melissa Anderson
Plunging viewers into the thick of chaos, Leviathan explodes the antiquated paradigm of the documentary or ethnographic film, whose mission has traditionally been to educate or elucidate, to create something that seizes us, never letting us forget just how disordered the world is. This may be the greatest lesson any nonfiction film can teach us.
Anyone who enjoys overpowering cinematic sensation and watching people do a job will be predisposed to like Leviathan, Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Véréna Paravel’s avant-garde documentary about life aboard a commercial fishing vessel. Leviathan is an immersive experience, plunging viewers into darkness and chaos, amid a rush of vivid color and rapid movement.
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