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It’s a sea trek that relies on a moral compass as much as a nautical one as lead character Rike (Wolff) faces down an impossible dilemma. As much as it is a battle against the elements, it is also, without ever feeling heavy handed, a compelling allegory for the West’s absolute indifference to the refugee crisis.

[T]his film by Austrian director Wolfgang Fischer targets how easy it is for people to become as indifferent as nature to the suffering of others if it isn't in their faces.

Vivid location shooting carries us some distance beyond platitudes, to a place where even the wind starts to sound indistinguishable from human howling. Yet Fischer’s resolutely responsible storytelling – leagues removed from any anti-migrant hysteria – anchors the film, as does Wolff’s intelligent, keenly felt performance as a capable, concerned citizen confronted by a situation that surely demands the same urgent collective action taken on land after multi-car pile-ups.

Fischer’s direction is elegant and swift, ratcheting the film from serenity to panic with effortless panache. It’s a vital, highly intelligent movie that is both a first-class thriller and a biting commentary on our current world.

“Styx” is, paradoxically, a beautiful, if eccentric film... Everything feels at once ordinary and otherworldly, evoking a sense of the surreal in the everyday.

For a moral exercise so clean that it could be used in a philosophy textbook, the film is unerringly realistic (shooting on the open sea helps sell the illusion). Fischer makes sure of that by flattening out the action so that no part of this story is prioritized above another.

In short order, the larger world crashes in, and a story of radical, deeply privileged individualism gives way to a potent, messy and sometimes uncomfortable parable about what human beings owe one another. The refugees are adrift on a sea of global indifference.

Even in the middle of the ocean, miles away from human civilization, there’s no escape from racism, class hierarchies, and Western global hegemony.

Guided by a moral compass that refuses to be blown off course, Styx feels like a much needed wake-up call for a world increasingly deadened to compassion.

German director Wolfgang Fischer’s Styx (2018), one of the best films I’ve seen at Toronto this year, impresses with its clean, purposeful direction even in its elliptical opening scenes, before the plot narrows to a laser focus.

While we know intellectually that individuals are not to blame for a situation as complex as international displacement and border struggles, it is nevertheless satisfying to see such a simple equation, because we know that, on a certain level, it is also true.

This is “All Is Lost” with a spinning moral compass and a topical dimension that proves even more gripping than its brilliantly achieved visceral action.