The water rises. Places to flee shrink, and at some point the ground underfoot disappears below the surface. What a cat leapt onto was an old boat, and animals of other species were already aboard. The film "Flow" explains the word "adaptation" with this one scene.
It is a 2024 work directed and co-written by Gints Zilbalodis. A Latvian-French-Belgian co-production, it follows a cat's journey to survive alongside other animals as the water level rises sharply in a world where humans appear to have vanished. There is no dialogue, and no human voices are heard.
Production began in 2019 and took five and a half years. It was made with the free open-source software Blender, no storyboards were used, and there are no deleted scenes. Jacques Tati and "Future Boy Conan" served as inspirations. Zilbalodis, who had until then made every element on his own, worked with others on the script and the score for the first time on this film.
If mitigation is the work of cutting emissions, adaptation is the work of changing how one lives within change that has already arrived. "Flow" shows on a single boat the term that circulates as jargon in conference halls.
The approach the film chose is not to explain. It does not say why the water rises, and it does not weigh whose fault it is. Instead it leaves only the time after the water has risen. This choice, which lingers on the bodies enduring the consequences rather than pinning down the cause, creates a balance that leans neither on apocalyptic exaggeration nor on easy comfort.
What works best is the camera. The images, made without storyboards, glide within a single shot, and the audience sees the water at the cat's eye level. The texture of the water, its buoyancy, and the feel of wet fur dragging the body down take the place of dialogue.
There is a separate reason the premise of boarding one boat across species does not slide into a heartwarming fable. The animals do not understand one another and only stay pressed together because the boat is narrow.
There are parts that go slack. The rule of having no dialogue is powerful, but it lowers the density of information. As the journey continues past the midpoint, the causality of events loosens, and stretches appear where the audience follows along by leaning on the beauty of the images. For viewers who want to read symbols it is open space, but for viewers who want to follow a story it is delay.
The film won Best Animated Feature at the 2024 European Film Awards, and it won Best Animated Feature at the 97th Academy Awards. It was also nominated for Best International Feature, making it the first Latvian film both nominated for and awarded an Oscar. This is where work built up over five and a half years with free software has arrived.
The middle stretch, where causality blurs, is a loss the film accepted. In exchange for erasing dialogue, events flow past unexplained, and some viewers remain outside that flow to the end. Still, the sensation of different beasts sharing the narrow floor of one boat in a world where the water has risen does not fade.
What "Flow" holds onto in the end is the texture of time spent floating together on the water. How to overcome disaster is not this film's concern.
