Europa (2021)
★ — Europa (2021)
Seventy-two minutes. That is all Europa asks of you. Seventy-two minutes, and I still wanted them back.
This one came to me via my A-Z World Movie Tour, with Jordan as the destination. I genuinely look forward to these pickups. Part of the fun is landing somewhere unexpected, finding a film that shows you a corner of the world you would not have sought out on your own. Sometimes you get a hidden gem. Sometimes you get seventy-two minutes of heavy breathing in a forest. This, unfortunately, was the latter.
The idea behind Europa is not without merit. Following a lone figure making his way through wilderness, stripped of dialogue, stripped of conventional narrative, letting landscape and physicality do the talking. I can see what they were going for. Survival cinema has a proud tradition of saying very little while communicating a great deal. The problem here is that Europa says very little while communicating almost nothing at all.
After the first ten minutes, I had a reasonable handle on what the film was doing. A man. A forest. Exhaustion. Struggle. Fine. But then nothing changes. Not the tone, not the pace, not the visual language, not the emotional register. It is rinse and repeat from beginning to end. Heavy breathing. Grunting. More forest. More breathing. The scenery shifts slightly but the experience does not. There is no escalation, no revelation, no moment where the film cracks open and gives you something to hold onto. It just continues existing at you.
And I will give it this: the picture quality is genuinely good. Whoever was behind the camera knew how to shoot a landscape. There are frames here that look properly striking. But beautiful images alone do not make a film, and when every shot is essentially a variation on the same theme, even the prettiness starts to blur into wallpaper.
Then we arrive at the ending. The final ten minutes, give or take, consist of our main character lying in a boat. One continuous shot. Still breathing heavily. The boat drifts. He breathes. That is it. I understand the argument for that kind of restraint, I really do. But restraint only works when it is earned, when the film has built something that the silence can pay off. Europa had not built anything. So the ten-minute boat shot felt less like a bold artistic choice and more like the film simply running out of ideas and deciding to wait until the clock ran out.
I came away from this thinking about how difficult it genuinely is to pull off minimalist survival filmmaking. When it works, it is extraordinary. When it does not, it is just a person making laboured sounds in a natural setting for an hour and a bit. Europa, for all its noble intentions, lands firmly in the second category. There is very little here to recommend, and I say that without any real pleasure. I wanted Jordan to deliver something. It did not.
One star.
Rating: ★ | Year: 2021 | Watched: 2025-07-03
Where to watch
Watch in the UK
Stream: Amazon Prime Video · Amazon Prime Video with Ads
Rent: Apple TV Store · Amazon Video · Google Play Movies · Sky Store
Buy: Apple TV Store · Amazon Video · Google Play Movies · Sky Store
Physical: Amazon UK · Zavvi
Watch in the US
Stream: Film Movement Plus · Film Movement Plus Amazon Channel
Physical: Amazon US
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