Avis des critiques

It makes the leisurely violence of a massive freighter the stuff of a sci-fi nightmare.

A hypnotic and visually stunning log of the Fair Lady freighter's voyage to destinations unknown, Dead Slow Ahead, the directorial debut of Spanish cinematographer Mauro Herce, is more about the journey itself than it is about the final port of call. With artful, sometimes abstract compositions, scant dialogue, trance-inducing music, and a pace that captures the lumbering ship's own momentum, this experimental documentary submerges viewers in the details.

It has its moments of visual poetry; when we get a sense of scale, it's hypnotic. The desolate, infinite ocean; the mammoth cargo-hold that dwarves its workers; a storm cloud opening in the distance. At other times, watching the drunk crew sing karaoke is comparatively dull.

Herce's background as a cinematographer on such painterly films as Arraianos and Ocaso is instrumental in Dead Slow Ahead, as he approaches his milieu less like a documentarian sniffing out stories than a scientist carefully calibrating the parameters of his environment. The images have a stately, interstellar quality, like cautiously distant views of an alien planet visited for the first time.

Shots of the crew are furtive, surprising, as if they are intruders on the ship's structural perfection. Immersive experience seems to be Dead Slow Ahead's end, and it excels in that degree, allowing the viewer to ponder isolation surrounded by unmovable force throughout its ruminative 70 minutes.

With a background in cinematography, Herce captures an astonishing array of natural wonders and crafts an extra-sensory tableaux of near-surrealist imagery with a steady hand and acute eye for the beauty of his surroundings. With its prismatic range of primary colors, aural ambiance, and disorienting spatial arrangements, the film constructs an immense formal infrastructure through which to conceive of the sheer physicality of life aboard the freighter.

Herce has sculpted an aesthetically aberrant documentary that, while grounded in the vicissitudes of uneasy labour, effectively partakes of science fiction. Herce renders the fathomable into something utterly strange, teasing an intrinsically outré quality from objects or scenarios that have become fixed by routine perception (with cinema being among such routines).

Herce began his filmmaking career as a cinematographer; and his riveting and eerie visual style in Dead Slow Ahead successfully captures the monumentality of the bulker—and man's smallness within it—as well the diminutiveness of humankind's pretension and enterprise within nature's immense watery arena.