Styx

Rike is a doctor in an emergency room. She has not taken leave for years and finally sets out sailing alone; her destination is an island in the middle of the Atlantic. The boat is small and everything on it is in order. She rides out a storm. The next morning she sees a boat on the horizon: an overloaded fishing trawler, sinking, with hundreds of people on it. She calls the coastguard on the radio. The answer is clear: do not approach, wait. A boy jumps into the water and swims towards her. Rike is a doctor, she is alone, and all she has is a boat. Wolfgang Fischer directs; he wrote the script with Ika Kunzel. Susanne Wolff plays Rike. It is a German and Austrian co-production. The film screened in the Panorama section of the 2018 Berlin Film Festival, where it won the Heiner Carow Prize and the prize of the Ecumenical Jury. There is almost no dialogue; the narrative proceeds through radio calls and one face. The matter it treats is the limit of help; the rules say one thing and conscience another, and both sides offer a defensible reason. The sea scenes were shot on a real boat and there is no feel of a studio. The film does not leave the rescued as a crowd; through one boy the question becomes personal. The narrative does not make a villain of the coastguard; the system works without a person in it. The opening scene begins with the monkeys of Gibraltar and resembles nothing else in the film. The ending brings no solution and offers no relief. Its limit is bareness; the narrative is silent, has one character, and there is very little plot. Who it is for: viewers who like films with few words that draw tension out of a situation. Who it is not for: it is silent, heavy, and the ending uncomfortable.