STILL THE WATER – Review by Liz Braun
Nature and spirituality centre the quiet drama of Still The Water, writer/director Naomi Kawase’s 2014 feature covering life, death and the whole damn thing.
Kawase’s film unfolds in a slow and languorous fashion, leading with hypnotic visuals of the ocean and the landscape of the Japanese island of Amami-Oshima, where the director has family ties. Still The Water seems to be treading water at times, given its pace and its meandering storytelling, and all the talk of death and love and spirituality and nature is sometimes confusing. The film is always engaging to look at, but the characters seem involved in a search for meaning that leads nowhere.
That might be the point.