Review of Leviathan (2012)
Seen in 2025.
Work on a fishing boat out of contemporary New Bedford, Massachusetts.
The marine equivalent of Our Daily Bread (2005): Uncommented, lacking in dialogue and character, void of Aristotelian narrative, and intensely relevant to the basis of your life in an industrialized economy. The typeface of the credits is heavy metal, and although there is no overt connection to H. P. Lovecraft’s New England, there is a thematic connection. Ethnographers let their GoPro cameras plunge and bob. Darkness overwhelms the crappy colour depth of the night shots and cacophony overwhelms the soundtrack. The end credits list marine species by their Linnaean names alongside human fishermen, and name several Bedford fishing boats lost at sea. Is the sea itself the Leviathan of Job (ca. 550–200 BCE), or is humankind?