Flow

Watching Flow felt like hearing a cinematic whisper—an animated feature that, by stripping away dialogue, finds a nearly mystical narrative strength. Gints Zilbalodis leads the viewer through a post-apocalyptic, waterlogged world where the protagonist, a black cat, survives a massive flood that drowns all traces of human civilization. The choice to forgo speech isn’t a gimmick—it’s deliberate. Here, water becomes the storyteller, and the pure instincts of animals become the language. Every movement, every glance, every meow or chirp becomes a universal code of emotion and survival.

Visually, Flow is stunning. Its raw aesthetic—meticulously crafted with Blender—produces flooded landscapes that shift between realism and dreamlike abstraction. Giant flowers, sunken buildings, and mirrored waters that reflect skies like memory fragments give the film a transitory, almost spiritual beauty. Zilbalodis, serving also as art director and cinematographer, imagines a world poised between ruin and rebirth.

Notably, there is no anthropomorphism here. The cat doesn’t speak, smile, or wink. She feels. Every encounter—be it with a lemur obsessed with shiny objects or a crane guiding the raft—is driven by instinct, not imposed human traits. That decision becomes a quiet triumph: Flow proposes that cooperation, not comprehension, is the essence of coexistence. In a world overtaken by nature, survival is not about dominance—it’s about fluidity, trust, and letting go.

One particularly moving scene captures this philosophy. The cat, perched on the edge of her makeshift boat, stares at a school of fish dancing beneath the dark water. The camera levels with her eyes, dissolving the barrier between viewer and character. We don’t just see the fish—we feel the longing, the quiet recognition of beauty in the midst of desolation. It’s a poetic moment that encapsulates the film’s ethos: presence over plot, atmosphere over action.

And yet, Flow isn’t always seamless. In some stretches, its meditative pace becomes too slow, veering toward a kind of aesthetic inertia. There are moments when the spell breaks—not for lack of beauty, but from a pause that lingers too long. Still, the sound design, based entirely on real animal recordings, keeps the experience grounded. Each splash, chirp, and rustle maintains the sense of being immersed in something wild, uncurated, alive.

Zilbalodis’s direction is a quiet act of defiance. As writer, director, editor, animator, and composer, he shapes the film with a singular vision—cohesive and unmistakably personal. This “one-man studio” approach brings authenticity and unity, though it does limit certain emotional and musical depths that might have been achieved with a broader creative team. The score, for instance, feels too restrained at times, echoing the film’s overall minimalism.

But ultimately, Flow is a cinematic meditation on trust, adaptation, and the fleeting nature of existence. As the cat learns to rely on others—and as the animals slowly come to work together—the film evolves into a fable of interdependence. It asks us to rethink not only how we communicate, but why we assume communication must always involve language at all.

The originality of its dialogue-free design, the precision of its visual world-building, and the physicality of its animal characters elevate Flow beyond typical animation. It’s not perfect, and it doesn’t try to be. But in its quiet, fluid way, it becomes a rare kind of experience: not a story told, but a feeling remembered. For audiences craving an emotional reset and a cinematic breath of fresh air, Flow offers something unforgettable.



Flow (Straume, 2024 – Latvia/France/Belgium)
Director: Gints Zilbalodis
Screenplay: Gints Zilbalodis, Matīss Kaža
Runtime: 84 min.