Luminous sea jellies beam over choirs of fish as we travel 4 km deep into the Pacific ocean off Costa Rica to reach the pitch black ‘aphotic’ zone. There, in a digital imaginary ocean, the Duga radar (a Soviet-era missile defense system near Chernobyl) is an undersea ruin far beneath the waves.
16-minute short on MUBI. Constantly surprising: for something underwater, that you would therefore conceive of as slow, there’s an amazing amount of visual energy and invention at play. It switches every ten, twenty or thirty seconds, presenting a new alien tableau. Very good sound work, too: drowned voices shouting out of the deep. Eleven minutes in, the camera pulls all the way back to do “landscape,” as it were, and the effect is stunning. I know I’m going to watch this ten more times.
The director also made the excellent BURIAL.
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