FLOW. The Cat Who Sailed with a Capybara [REVIEW]

Cats are quintessential individualists. It’s often said they always follow their own paths and tolerate human company only for occasional affection and a steady supply of food (my cat is pointedly staring at me as I write this sentence). The protagonist of Flow fits neatly into this stereotype—at least at the start of Gints Zilbalodis’s film. The nameless black cat lives and hunts alone. Nights are spent in the attic of an abandoned house, and days pass in a relentless struggle for food against other animals, often larger and stronger. The solitary life of a feline individualist becomes even more challenging when, out of nowhere, water levels on Earth begin to rise. Survival alone becomes impossible—surviving requires cooperation, and not just any kind, but interspecies collaboration.

We learn almost nothing about the cause of the apocalypse in Flow. Zilbalodis spares us details about the world he depicts, compelling us to speculate while inviting active observation in place of passive, monotonous story-following. His latest animation feels like a fragment of an alternative reality—a reality where humans have been replaced by animals, once again becoming the undisputed rulers of the planet. Traces of our unfortunate civilization remain visible: monumental structures and desolate metropolises, once vibrant, now abandoned and partially submerged (the final sequences of A.I. Artificial Intelligence might have served as a visual inspiration here). Perhaps Earth has finally done what it should have: rid itself of the ungrateful tenants who were steadily driving it to ruin.

The animals in the film offer no insight into what happened to humanity. Zilbalodis bends the conventions of the animal fable by not giving his characters human voices. Instead, each speaks in its own “language”: the cat meows, the capybara hums, the lemur squeaks, the Labrador barks, and the bird chirps. This cacophony proves surprisingly refreshing. The absence of human speech introduces a contemplative, almost mystical element to Flow. Without conventional dialogue, the film allows viewers to fully immerse themselves in its audiovisual experience—its sparse plot recedes to the background, making way for other aspects of the film. The oceanic odyssey of the five animals becomes primarily an aesthetic experience, enhanced by an elegant symphonic soundtrack personally overseen by the director.

I recall that one of the first thoughts I had while watching Flow was about its connection to the aesthetics of video games. This is largely due to the DIY production methods employed by the Latvian filmmaker—his animations are created almost entirely in Blender, a software equally suited for game design. But the similarities don’t end there. Zilbalodis’s narrative style also has more in common with “game” storytelling than traditional film. The rich, mysterious world he builds is always more crucial and intriguing than the delicately sketched plot or characters, whose role is to traverse quasi-fairytale realms. This pattern fits not only Flow but also Zilbalodis’s previous feature-length animation, Away, where we follow the journey of a nameless boy fleeing a shadowy giant on a motorcycle. Zilbalodis’s films create the (illusory) sense of interaction with the depicted world, provoking a desire for further exploration—hallmarks of the best video games.

Flow shares one more trait with games: a posthumanist perspective. It contemplates the world that will emerge after humanity’s era ends. On a computer screen, far more often than on a cinema screen, we encounter stories devoid of humans—stories where animals, struggling to adapt to a “post-human” reality, take center stage. Perhaps my perspective is slightly skewed (I spend much more time with films), but in the past few months alone, I’ve completed two games that followed a similar narrative pattern: Spirit of the North and Stray. The protagonist of the former was a fox wandering alone through a devastated Earth. The hero of the latter was a cat aiding clumsy androids—former human servants—in their struggle against dangerous Zurks. Despite minor differences, both games’ narratives revolved around the same question: how will the world fare without humans? The answer, each time, was identical, aligning with the conclusion of Zilbalodis’s film: quite well.

Flow concludes with a subtle narrative symmetry centered on the motif of reflection. In the opening scene, a lone cat peers into the water. In the finale, the entire crew of the ship repeats this gesture. Seeing one’s reflection is the best, almost tangible proof of existence and the perfect starting point for reflection on identity, place, and the inevitable changes that are part of every life. For the protagonist of Flow, everything changes between one reflection and the next. In the film’s conclusion, instead of a solitary feline individualist, we see a member of a greater whole—an interspecies community that survived by cooperating beyond boundaries.