Leviathan is a documentary horror film painted in expressive primary colours on a black canvas. As brutal as a black metal concert, as dramatic as Melville's novel, and as grotesque as all the biblical plagues served in one go - and yet it's merely about a nocturnal excursion on a fishing trawler. The boat creaks and rattles, while the black-green water lashes its sides and the seagulls are fighting over the severed fishheads that are rolling around its floor, while yet another net-load is heaved aboard. The directing duo Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Véréna Paravel have installed small cameras everywhere on the boat, and they paint the drama of life and death with impasto layers. But they do not use abstraction for abstraction's sake. 'Leviathan' is also an anthropological study in man's relationship to nature and the confrontation with "raw life", towards a realisation that we may only have access to through the basic elements of the film medium: light, colour, sound, darkness. A highly physical but nonetheless transcendental total experience.

• Credits
• Contact