Documentary filmmaking is often derided for being stuffy; Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Verena Paravel won’t be accused of that. Their documentary about commercial fishing has mere scraps of incidental dialogue, a deafening boat engine on much of the soundtrack, only a handful of scenes that show human faces and, for the first 10 minutes (at least) of weaving nighttime digital camerawork, you frequently have no idea what the heck you are looking at.
For some viewers, this will be entirely too far in the opposite direction; when “Leviathan” was screened at the New York Film Festival last year, numerous walkouts were reported. The adventurous souls who stick with it, however, will find head-spinning images and a cumulative impact that does, in fact, amount to a story.
It’s shot mostly at night, and there are no more than a few choppy glimpses of humans until the film is well underway. The directors used small waterproof cameras to record things that come at the audience piecemeal. Some shots seem calculated to make you seasick, and you better get used to water distorting the lens. But the imagination here is arresting; ropes and nets look like undulating monsters, flocks of gulls are shot from dizzying upside-down angles.
In the most memorable scene, the camera belly-flops to put you eyeball to eyeball with a dying, pop-eyed fish, and then an entire deck full of them — an image that evokes our ocean carnage with chilling effect.
From the churning on-deck opening to the final suffocating shots, “Leviathan” suggests that plunder as we might, the sea will overtake us in the end.