‘Flow’ Review: Earnest Feline Spin on Climate Change Era Noah’s Ark Story Lacks Boldness | London Film Festival

I don’t play video games, as to quote the great modern philosopher Adrian Chiles, they’re not good for your mental health if “you play like me” (badly). However, there are enough people in my life for whom a controller might as well be a fifth limb, so much so that I’ve experienced the entirety of the 2022 indie game sensation Stray vicariously – and this is why I found comparisons with festival favorite Flow completely inescapable. Both are survival tales of boisterous felines facing up to the apocalypse with no owner in sight, although Latvia’s submission for the Best International Film Oscar takes place far away from the rain-soaked, neon-hewed, Blade Runner-style cityscapes that populate the game. It’s a movie about the damaging effects climate change is wrecking on our natural world, and the comparisons to Terrence Malick, due to its focus on how the animal kingdom adapts to man made catastrophe as humanity is kept out of frame, is more justifiable than you might expect. 

However, I found myself left far colder than most on the acclaimed CGI animation due to the other similarity it shares with Malick’s work which has gone largely under discussed; the not-so-subtle biblical undercurrents that render it a cheesy updating of Noah’s Ark for the Net Zero age. As someone with no faith, I have often found myself moved by unlikely faith-based narratives onscreen, but the way Flow reinterprets a famous religious fable feels like what a “cool” youth pastor would show the kid congregation at a Sunday School class to remind them of the eternal urgency of scripture. A story with contemporary relevance feels beholden to a theology none of its animal protagonists follow. 

The video game comparison made at the top of this review isn’t a flippant one; as each sequence is framed like a cut-scene, the action moves with urgency into frame in a way that recalls the moment you’re required to stop watching and start controlling your screen avatar. Our unnamed central feline is first introduced cowering from a stampede of dogs, followed by an even greater stampede of wild animals fleeing from a biblical tidal wave, having to think on its feet to try and stay afloat instead of getting washed under. As far as opening set pieces go, it’s hard to think of one aimed at very young children which does a better job of immediately establishing its life-or-death stakes – and it’s one director Gints Zilbalodis finds impossible to recreate, with the most impactful moments after this being carbon copies of the striking introduction. 

As the water levels continue to rise, our feline friend teams up with a rag-tag group of mismatched animals, all of whom navigate the endless seas on their makeshift arc. No, the creatures don’t all come in pairs based on their species – it’s to the credit of Zilbalodis and co-screenwriter Matīss Kaža that he never insults the intelligence of his young audience by making the similarities between the two stories obvious. If you were to be charitable, it makes Flow less a modernization of a biblical story and more of a recontextualization, acknowledging the climate context that some religious denominations still feel reluctant to. But whilst that gives the story a sense of urgency, it’s lacking the boldness that will leave a lasting impression beyond the youngest of viewers, and it’s on that front where I can’t comprehend the widespread festival acclaim. There’s been no shortage of impactful narratives about the doomed trajectory of our planet in recent years, and whilst it’s undeniably positive that children have an adventure film about the importance of team work to find solutions to navigate it, their parents have been routinely offered richer food for thought elsewhere.  

The animation itself also has a video-game level quality, with the visuals never as richly developed as countless other cinematic CGI tales of animals in the wilderness (or, damningly, Stray), unable to achieve the level of photorealism it aspires to. This is at least forgivable – it’s unheard of for such a small, independent animation from a nation not known for its film industry to have a breakout success like this. But when the effects of climate change have been explored so thoroughly elsewhere, and in ways palatable for young minds, it does only add to my confusion as to why this has been plucked out of obscurity and elevated to its current status. It’s a movie where the significance of the message it aims to unpack is easy to celebrate in the abstract, but I wish the movie communicated it with more of a punch, instead of letting itself get swept away with the tides.

Grade: C+ 

This review is from the 2024 London Film Festival. Flow will have a limited theatrical release in the U.S. by Janus Films and Sideshow on November 22 and will go wider on December 6.

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Alistair Ryder

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