Meow

Continuing my trip up Empire's top 20 films of 2025

#5 :  Flow

Already, Flow has seemed to live nine lives. The second film from Latvian animator Gilts Zilbalodis was created by a remarkably small team, on free 3D software Blender; from there, it went on to win Best Picture at the Oscars, reaching audiences all around the world along the way. And it’s clear why – the gently post-apocalyptic tale of a cat traversing a flooded landscape, encountering several other animals along the way (some dogs, a lemur, a capybara, and a secretary bird among them), is a meditative and mesmerisingly beautiful odyssey, its lucid, dialogue-free storytelling accessible to… well, everybody, of any age, of any language. Part adventure movie, part survival drama, part fable, Flow is undeniably original, a great film in its own right – and one that proves anything is possible in an age where filmmaking tools are available at the click of a button. Those nine lives are set to live on for a long, long time to come.

This is obviously well regarded (they don't give out them Oscars to any old films you know) but I suspect there would have been little chance of me watching it under any other circumstances.

And well, it's undeniably beautiful, meditative and original but I think it's probably fair to say that not an awful lot happens - gently post-apocalyptic is amusingly accurate from Empire. And it's an interesting post-apocalyptic landscape because a) it doesn't make any sense and b) we have no idea how things might have ended up this way - but it doesn't really seem to matter. I'm also not really able to tell you what (if anything) the film is trying to tell me - the cat meets and interacts with various other animals, some positively and some less so and I found myself observing this and thinking "hmmm - yes".

However much is or isn't going on, it is always lovely to look at - it has a different animation style with almost translucent foreground characters which interact with the light in very interesting ways. It also has really crisp sound - which is a good job because there's absolutely no dialogue to listen to.

And I suspect that's pretty much all I have to say on the matter. A lot of the interest in this film for me is the intriguing decisions made by the filmmakers - this film is very different in a lot of ways. Which makes it diverting, but I'm not entirely sure it makes it all that interesting - it was only 80 minutes so I certainly didn't feel like it was wasting too much of my time but I also don't feel I took anything away from it. A tad more plot probably wouldn't have hurt matters for me - although if you read the internet there are a million possible plots and motivations out there (some of which make more sense than others). 

But I get the impression it's more like a open-ended video game where the film-makers decided to give some animals some basic characteristics and just let them loose in an unusual environment and see where things ended up - one might even say they just went with the Flow. I think some people will absolutely love this and others will shrug their shoulders and think "what's the point to that then?" - I end up somewhere in the middle and think it's worth checking out, but I can't say I quite see the fuss. If you want to give it a go, then it's currently available to stream on MUBI or to rent in all the usual locations.

#6 - An enjoyable nasty film