Ivan Radford | On 04, May 2025

Director: Gints Zilbalodis
Cast: Gints Zilbalodis
Certificate: U

There aren’t many films that don’t have humans as the main character. There are even fewer films that have no humans in them at all. Gints Zilbalodis’ Flow is one of them – and it’s a gorgeous one, at that.

The Latvian animation follows a cat who faces a cataclysmic flood and has to find a way to survive in the aftermath. The watery apocalypse arrives without warning, so that we experience it the way our lone feline does – and there’s no spoonfed explanation as to why or how. What we do see, however, is a remarkable world, filled with lush, colourful natural landscapes – and some dizzying architectural feats from man-made civilisation, which are somehow even more astonishing when half-underwater. It’s like watching a prequel to Atlantis.

Our hero survives partly because they manage to climb aboard a fortuitous boat, which takes on the role of a pseudo-Noah’s Ark, becoming a home to a range of creatures: a seemingly unfazed capybara, a cheeky ring-tailed lemur, and a dog. They don’t have a voice cast dispatching dialogue, nor do they have anthromorphosised characteristics – they’re simply animals allowed to be animals, and that decision elevates Flow’s tale from the pretty to the profound.

The more time we spend with this ragtag pack of furballs, the more we begin to relate to and care about them, and Zilbalodis (who also helmed 2019’s Away) gives us just enough personality for the animals to feel distinct and real. We often see things from the cat’s attentive perspective, before zooming out to show us how small and resilient they are against the wider, disrupted backdrop – one often filled, intriguingly, with feline statuettes. Animated with open-source software Blender, it’s an occasionally janky but gorgeously idiosyncratic feat of indie animation that bursts with care and creativity.

What caused the flooding in the first place? We don’t need to have seen humans in the beforetimes to guess that this came about due to the climate crisis. What we do see first-hand, however, is the need to grow from an isolationist existence to one of mutual cooperation and support in order to survive. Sometimes, you just have to go with the flow.

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