REVIEW - LEVIATHAN

The artificial lights illuminate objects in the darkness, a matte, glistening neon reflects off surfaces, the ocean is lit as an oily, shimmering lacquer. The monstrous mass of metal emits guttural groans and agonising screeches, the gargantuan task at hand taking its terrible toll on a vessel that can, and must, only sustain. The nets are cast in, bulging with debris and flesh, a crude collection of solid and liquid somehow bound together; they are let open, and the creatures within plummet to the dirty, greasy floor, writhing, twitching away their last allowances of life. The human hands, gloved, toss themselves in, landing with a flabby pat on the slippery carcasses before they commence their carnage - worn, archaic weaponry that primitively hacks through meat and bone, beheading these beasts with foresight to the squeams and squirms of the English-speaking market onshore, on a dry, stable land a world away. The blood oozes, thick, vermillion, like ketchup, sticky, coating the walls, dripping from edges, adhering to things like watery red glue. The lens dips below the sea level, rushes of water charging tinnily past, bracing, refreshing, not cleansing. Its colours are shades of silver, in shapes of science-fiction dreamscapes; its sounds are brisk, joyous, percussive, almost electronic. The birds flock, graceful apparitions against a bleak sky, in formations bringing about beautiful distraction, swerving with the prey they seek. The message is abstract, its disclosure equally so. Amid horror and humour there rest the enigmatic, the artistic, the sublime, and the natural, the explicable, the mundane. Not preaching to any crowd, but provoking disquiet - it's one thing to rapturously agree, it's another to feel challenged, but also enriched. The close is chaotic, abstruse, an assault of sound and image: an inconclusive conclusion, or a sweeping statement, washing clear all of the beauty and the barbarism and the mystery of life, washing it clear with dirty water.