Styx

After this mesmerizing thriller’s weird prelude (in which a pair of monkeys silently crawl around urban rooftops while emergency responders in the street below treat an accident victim), Styx settles into a cracking seafaring misadventure. Rike (Susanne Wolff) is a German doctor sailing alone between Gibraltar and Darwin’s Ascension Island. She was part of that medical team in the film’s opening, where her stability and judgement in a crisis was plainly evident. Her assuredness is again clear as she confidently handles her bouncing boat one night during a lashing storm. But nothing prepares Rike for the humanitarian emergency that she eventually faces on this ocean voyage, when she spots a broken-down fishing trawler full of desperate refugees that is stalled at a distance from her boat. Repeatedly radioing for assistance, Rike is tersely warned by officials not to intervene in the humanitarian disaster, but those same authorities never show up to rescue the howling passengers who are leaping into the ocean. Events that follow put Rike to a test of whether to follow her rescuer instincts or yield to the legal threat of an obviously hands-off Coast Guard. Austrian co-writer/director Wolfgang Fischer has created a timely tale for our contemporary era of banishing and bashing immigrants and refugees. With his eerie engagement of vast distances and unrecognizable sounds—all from Rike’s helpless perspective—Fischer delivers a kind of ghost story on the sea. Highly recommended. (T. Keogh)