Bracing sail into a choppy moral sea
In Wolfgang Fischer’s physically bracing, waterborne morality play “Styx,” one person’s lifesaving skill set collides with a system unwilling to deploy that aid.
Not that skilled German ER doctor Rike (Susanne Wolff ) can’t tend to a car accident victim like the one benefiting from her expertise in the film’s opening moments. But when this ultracapable woman leaves on a solo sailing voyage toward Ascension Island, then finds herself in the path of a fishing trawler crammed with dehydrated African refugees, her radio calls to the coast guard are met with indifference, inaction and orders to stay far away.
The situation intensifies when a boy named Kingsley (Gedion Oduor Wekesa) makes his way to her boat. Rike’s now in the middle of a humanitarian crisis, trapped between her calling as a First World healer and the psychological, political realities of that wider, crueler other world.
But even with a heavyhanded, between-realms allegory of a title, “Styx” is, thanks to Fischer’s focused direction, Benedict Neuenfels’ clear-eyed cinematography, and Wolff ’s concentrated portrayal of conscience under pressure, more an immersive experience than a didactic one. Its dizzying strength is as a visceral journey, a detour from the privileged freedom represented by a horizon to the tragic limbo of displacement, an ocean that’s both a confinement and an abyss. “Styx.” In English and German with English subtitles. Not rated. Running time: 1 hour, 34 minutes. Playing: Laemmle Royal, West L.A.; Laemmle Playhouse 7, Pasadena; Laemmle Town Center, Encino.