Flow (2024)
The hype around Flow had been building for months by the time I finally sat down with it, and I'll be honest: I went in expecting something genuinely special. What I got was a decent, engaging animated film that left me a little cold, and mostly because critics had been telling me I was about to witness something extraordinary.
The first thing that hit me, right from the off, was the complete absence of dialogue. Not a single word, for the entire runtime. I actually had to do a quick mental double-take. We've seen this pulled off brilliantly in short bursts before. The opening act of Wall-E is the obvious reference point, and it's a genuinely masterful piece of wordless filmmaking. But sustaining that across a full feature is a far more ambitious undertaking, and director Gints Zilbalodis deserves real credit for making it work as well as he does. The tension in the perilous sequences is genuinely well-constructed. You don't need characters narrating their own panic to feel it, and Zilbalodis understands that. The story holds together, the pacing is confident, and there's something almost meditative about spending this much time with a cat navigating a flooded world without anyone explaining anything to you.
So far, so good. And then we get to the visuals, which is where I have to split from the crowd a bit.
Critics have been falling over themselves to praise the look of this film, and I genuinely don't get it. I found the animation noticeably rough around the edges, and not in a stylised, intentional way that I could get behind (the way I can with something like Josep, which wears its artistic choices proudly). Flow looked, at points, like I was watching a very long cutscene from a mid-budget video game. And here's the irony that I kept coming back to: the game Stray, which is also about a lone cat moving through a world without dialogue, has noticeably richer, more immersive visuals than this film. That's a strange position to find yourself in when the animation is supposedly one of the main selling points.
I want to be fair here, because I don't think Flow is a bad film. It absolutely isn't. Zilbalodis clearly has a strong instinct for non-verbal storytelling, and that's not a small thing. Keeping an audience locked in for ninety minutes without a single line of spoken dialogue is a real achievement. But when a film arrives draped in the kind of critical praise this one has collected, specifically centred on its supposed visual ambition, and then falls short in exactly that area, it's hard not to feel the gap between expectation and reality quite sharply.
Three stars.
It's a solid piece of work. It kept me watching, it held my attention, and I came away with a genuine respect for what Zilbalodis was attempting. But groundbreaking? A visual triumph? I can't sign off on that. If you go in with modest expectations and an appreciation for stripped-back, quiet storytelling, you'll probably enjoy it more than I did. Just maybe don't read too many five-star reviews first.
Rating: ★★★ | Year: 2024 | Watched: 2026-06-10
Where to watch
Watch in the UK
Stream: MUBI · MUBI Amazon Channel
Rent: Apple TV Store · Rakuten TV · Amazon Video · Curzon Home Cinema
Buy: Apple TV Store · Rakuten TV · Amazon Video · Sky Store
Physical: Amazon UK · Zavvi
Watch in the US
Stream: Criterion Channel
Rent: Amazon Video · Apple TV Store · Google Play Movies · YouTube
Buy: Amazon Video · Apple TV Store · Google Play Movies · YouTube
Physical: Amazon US
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