90
The New York Times by A.O. Scott
By setting Genovés’s words in counterpoint with the recollections of seven of the participants who are still alive, [Lindeen] reinterprets the experiment, finding meanings that the scientist missed.
What are people saying?
What are critics saying?
75
Slant Magazine by Christopher Gray
The film uses Santiago Genovés’s experiment to scrutinize memory and capture the feeling of life under a very curious sort of dictatorship.
75
The Raft, like the people aboard it, floats along the surface of a vast ocean of mystery and memory. The result is a bizarre, captivating, and borderline unbelievable memory play that only supports a hypothesis Genovés wasn’t prepared to consider: We are blind to the world as it is when we only saw the world as we are.
70
Screen Daily by Fionnuala Halligan
A thoughtful and fascinating piece, it’s a game of two halves, however, with Lindeen making heavy work of modern-day footage which tends to drag on the dynamism of the past.
90
The surprisingly short leap from radical academic study to lurid exploitation is navigated with wit, sensitivity and rueful social awareness in Swedish director Marcus Lindeen’s gripping debut feature The Raft.
80
It sounds like Big Brother on a boat, but The Raft is an absorbing portrait of a bold (or foolhardy) historical experiment that hits many of today’s hot-button topics, dominated by a compelling and complex central figure.
60
The Guardian by Peter Bradshaw
It is an interesting story, and yet the film doesn’t quite summon up the atmosphere of the raft. It doesn’t fully plunge you into that strange milieu, nor does it quite analyse exactly what was going on.
63
RogerEbert.com by Simon Abrams
One of the main pleasures of watching The Raft, a new documentary that combines decades-old footage of the Acali's 101-day voyage with modern-day commentary by the ship's six surviving crew mates, is that the Acali's story isn't just told from Genoves's self-mythologizing perspective.
80
It’s all splendid fruit for a documentary, especially given two things: the remarkable filmed record of the expedition at the time, and the fact that seven of its members are still alive.
83
The Film Stage by Vikram Murthi
The footage astounds, but the competing contextualizations breathe new life into the experiment, especially when Lindeen allows the surviving members free reign to confront past emotions.