STYX (Wolfgang Fischer, 2017): Germany, Austria

Reviewed by Omar Jbilou. Viewed at the AFI Fest 2018.

Styx, the last movie of Austrian director Wolfgang Fischer features the German actress Susanne Wolff as a lone sailor who encounters a trawler full of refugees; It’s an original piece of cinema that carries a bold message with very little dialogue.

The first scene shows a long shot of an intersection where a car crashes during a race. The unconscious driver is shown bleeding out until the paramedics arrive a few minutes later, and that’s where Rike (Wolff) appears for the first time. She’s an assiduous German emergentist who sets off on her yacht to visit Ascension Isle in the Atlantic Ocean during her work vacation. She does every little thing meticulously as we watch her pack her provisions on the twelve-meter boat and plan for the route; Rike’s handling of the boat is smooth, almost feels natural. Her routine consists of morning swims, reading books and tanning.

Along the coast of Mauritania, Rike is warned of a long night of rain by the captain of a cargo boat nearby. A few hours past, she faces a towering storm. Sheets of rain were flogging on her, forked lightning was striking in the horizon while the waves were swinging her boat up and down. Rike, helpless, locks herself down and waits for the weather to get better.

In the morning, once the storm had passed, she perceives a fishing boat a couple hundred of meters away filled with refugees waving at her. She immediately alerts the coastguard that tells her a team was coming their way and orders her not to get involved. Meanwhile, refugees start jumping from the trawler and swimming towards Rike until one of the boys makes it. It takes her a good five minutes to bring him up as his body gave up on him as soon as he reached the boat. Hours passed by, Rike cleaned the boy’s wounds and brought him back to consciousness. He then tells her that his sister is still on the trawler. Rike realizes that help wasn’t coming anytime soon and that she needs to decide whether to help those people or not.

Named after a Greek river that forms the boundary between Earth and the Underworld, this movie depicts the ultimate compassion and humanity test, it’s a 94-minute roller coaster of emotions that personally left me sad being from Africa and knowing people who have been through that hell. I also felt Rike’s agony as she witnessed the refugees drawn waiting for the rescue team and calling every boat on sight for help.

The main character was outstandingly played by Wolff and the story really touched me, therefore I will give this movie a 7.5/10