The Stowaways (2023)

Right. I've sat through a lot of films for this A-Z World Movie Tour. Some have been brilliant, some have been baffling, and some have been a hard slog. But I don't think anything quite prepared me for The Stowaways, my pick for Azerbaijan, which may genuinely be one of the worst things I have ever watched. And I want to be careful with that claim, because I don't throw it around lightly. But here we are.

Let me try to describe what this film actually is, because "film" might be doing a lot of heavy lifting. What you're essentially getting is a loose collection of short clips, shot handheld, that appear to have been assembled with very little regard for narrative, coherence, or the patience of whoever ends up watching them. The director is clearly reaching for something avant-garde, something impressionistic and deliberately strange. I can respect that ambition, in theory. Experimental cinema has given us some genuinely extraordinary work. This is not that.

There's a scene, if you can call it that, of a woman washing what I can only describe as a chimpanzee-type furry creature with water, and then taking it to the beach. There's another of a middle-aged woman rolling a watermelon up a hill. There are random shots of what appears to be an Azerbaijani street. Random shots of sand. Throughout all of this, a low ambient synth hum drones on underneath, presumably to give the whole thing some sense of atmosphere or menace or meaning. It doesn't. It just makes the whole experience feel even more like something generated on a slow Tuesday afternoon with no particular goal in mind.

Now look, I'm not someone who needs a three-act structure and a tidy resolution to enjoy a film. I've been genuinely moved by challenging, non-linear work on this tour. Americana (2023) gave me plenty to wrestle with, and I appreciated the effort behind it even when it frustrated me. But there's a difference between a film that challenges you and a film that simply doesn't bother. The Stowaways feels like the latter. It's not provocative. It's not unsettling in an interesting way. It's just... pointless.

And I'm sorry, because I genuinely try to find something worth holding onto in every film I watch for this project. Azerbaijan deserves better representation than this. Every country does. When you sit down to watch a film from a part of the world you might not know well, there's real potential there, a window into something unfamiliar, something that might shift how you see things. I wanted that here. Instead I got a watermelon being pushed up a hill with a synth drone underneath it.

Maybe someone out there will watch this and find it transcendent. Maybe there's a reading of it I'm entirely missing. I'm genuinely open to that possibility. But based on what I experienced, sitting there watching grainy handheld clips with no discernible purpose strung together like outtakes from something that never got made, I can't in good conscience give this anything but the lowest score I can manage.

Half a star. And honestly, that half is for the watermelon, because at least that made me laugh.

Rating: ½  | Year: 2023  | Watched: 2025-05-25

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Where to watch

Watch in the UK
Stream: Amazon Prime Video · Amazon Prime Video with Ads
Rent: Amazon Video
Buy: Amazon Video
Physical: Amazon UK · Zavvi

Watch in the US
Rent: Amazon Video
Buy: Amazon Video
Physical: Amazon US

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