River

Two films. One narrator. One orchestra. One director. And they begin in almost exactly the same way. Black-and-white footage of musicians tuning up, and Willem Dafoe joking lightly at the microphone. This simple set-up is oddly reminiscent of the opening to Disney's Fantasia, in that it precedes an extraordinary cavalcade of images that will leave your eyes open in wonder and your heart overflowing like a weir in the rainy season.

In 2018, Dafoe narrated Mountain, a conceptual documentary about humanity's surprisingly brief relationships with the highest wild places. The text was taken from Robert McFarlane's Mountains of the Mind, and the Australian Chamber Orchestra performed a score by their lead, Richard Tognetti, all under the directorial eye of Jennifer Peedom. Now the ensemble gathers again (with Peedom joined by Joseph Nizeti as co-director) for River, a work that is equally enthralling, captivating, and insightful.

Mountain's thesis – beyond its beauty – was that people have only interacted with peaks for a few centuries, having previously eschewed them as bleak, cold, and dangerous places. But River posits a different view: that the Anthropocene epoch of humanity's existence was only facilitated by rivers: for water, transport, power, myth, community. Yet, much like mountains, our relationship with them has changed dramatically in recent times – how to run them as machines, as Dafoe intones from McFarlane's words.

Much as with Mountain, the power of River is not in presenting a radical new idea: It is in synthesizing what we already know and presenting it as a holistic whole. We know that we have turned rivers from mystical places into resources, but in its sumptuous 75-minute delivery River allows us to see the flow of that narrative. And it is beyond gorgeous, as visually dazzling (if not quite as stomach-churning for acrophobics) as Mountain: luscious landscapes of quiet streams, poisoned fish and angular dams presented as abstract patterns, and the quiet joy of swimming.

It's fascinating that River, originally released in Australia and the UK in 2022, finally gets a U.S. release for Earth Day 2023, and hot on the heels of the far more didactic drama How to Blow Up a Pipeline. Yet River is no less a work of polemic than its more openly revolutionary peer. The first half of the documentary is about our historical relationship with water: the second, about our current state of unbalance. And having Dafoe, with that gentle, forceful, menacing, soulful, and tender voice deliver the message – no stats but plenty of evocative facts about how much damage we have done and continue to do – brings the message home.

Yes, River flows in the wake of other documentaries, and some have called it redundant. But it is rather another drop in the flood of documentaries, and without all those drops, especially one so beautiful and challenging, there will never be any erosion of our antipathy to change. If the purpose of Mountain was to humble the viewer, then River is intended to quietly terrify us. Maybe that's exactly what we need.