The Forbidden River Review: Ecological Reckoning & Family Secrets | Cinematic Masterpiece

The Deluge We Deny: The Forbidden River as Hydrographic Reckoning

Water remembers. This primordial truth flows through every frame of director Anya Veleskov’s The Forbidden River, where the titular waterway isn’t merely setting but synaptic conductor for intergenerational trauma. We enter through viscous curtains of Northwest rain, the camera submerged beneath peat-dark currents as if viewing the world through amniotic fluid. These opening shots—unsettlingly tactile with their silt-clouded perspectives—establish water as both witness and jury to human transgressions. When Liam Neeson’s Elias Thorne hauls his nets through these poisoned waters, every strain in his shoulders speaks of drowned memories.

Confluence of Ghosts

Veleskov constructs the central father-daughter schism with geological patience. Neeson’s Elias moves through his clapboard house like a relic in a museum exhibit, dust motes dancing in shafts of weak light that never quite reach the corners. His performance is masterclass in repressed devastation; watch how his calloused fingers tremble microscopically when pouring whiskey, the liquid’s amber hue mirroring toxic plumes we’ll later see contaminating tribal fishing grounds. Florence Pugh’s Aris arrives not as prodigal daughter but colonial academic—her recording devices and journals weapons of extraction as violent as any corporate bulldozer. Their first shared meal plays out in excruciating silence broken only by cutlery scraping plates, the sound design emphasizing every swallow like stones dropped in a well.

"What you call legends are autopsy reports on the land," tribal elder Kwáni (Graham Greene) tells Aris, his voice rasping like river stones tumbling downstream. This line crystallizes the film’s central thesis: environmental devastation as spiritual murder.

The river’s awakening sequences demonstrate Veleskov’s genius for eco-horror as historical indictment. When Nəxʷsƛ̕áy̕əm manifests, it’s not through Hollywood spectacles but through violated natural laws—salmon swimming upside down, rain falling upward, children’s drawings bleeding pigments like open wounds. Cinematographer Darius Khondji lenses these phenomena with eerie banality, making the supernatural feel terrifyingly ecological. The river’s vengeance reaches its apotheosis in the 'Drowned Council' sequence: a hallucinatory tableau of colonial landowners materializing in oxygen-starved slow motion, their Victorian suits blooming with algae as they silently judge Elias from the riverbed.

Cinema as Ceremonial Vessel

Structurally, the film operates as ceremonial ritual. Notice how editor Joe Walker intercuts Aris’s academic lectures with time-lapse erosion footage—intellectual detachment versus geological reality. The screenplay by indigenous writer Elisa TallMoon rejects Western three-act conventions for a circular narrative reflecting Salish storytelling traditions. Revelations come not through exposition but environmental signifiers: the way currents carve patterns matching tribal petroglyphs, or how submerged machinery transforms into skeletal river guardians.

Pugh’s transformation from extractive researcher to humbled participant stands among her finest work. Observe her posture shift during the 'Truth Weighing' ritual: initially hunched over notebooks like a scavenger, later standing rib-exposed in the current, allowing the water to literally rearrange her bones. Neeson mirrors this physicality in reverse—his stoic fisherman’s armor progressively sloughing away until the climactic confession scene where he kneels in shallows, his voice disintegrating like wet paper: "We buried the reports where we buried the drums... thought the river would keep secrets."

Tributaries of Influence

The film’s hydro-centric mysticism flows directly from The Book of Nature’s transcendental wilderness, though Veleskov trades that film’s romanticism for uncompromising accountability. Its familial rupture recalls the father-daughter combustibility of Then I'll Come Back to You, yet transposes intimate betrayal onto biocultural scale. Most profoundly, it extends the radical indigenous consciousness of Oscar Micheaux’s Body and Soul, weaponizing spirituality against systemic oppression. The shamanic sequences where Kwáni communes with sturgeon ancestors particularly echo Paul Robeson’s possessed preacher—same spiritual voltage, redirected toward ecological justice.

Production designer Helen Jarrett’s achievement deserves laurels: her creation of the shape-shifting river mouth, constructed across three massive tanks with practical effects recalling The Walls of Jericho’s monumental sets, yet dynamically responsive to emotional crescendos. When the river reclaims Elias’s home during the third-act reckoning, watch how century-old photographs curl like birch bark, and porcelain heirlooms dissolve like sugar cubes—material history made ephemeral by water’s memory.

The Pact’s Price

The ceremonial climax—filmed in continuous takes during actual solstice downpours—achieves near-mythic power. Aris and Elias stand submerged to their necks where corporate dumping began, holding salvaged copper ritual bowls that must be filled not with water but mutual confession. Khondji shoots from below the surface, distorting their faces into ancestral masks as they speak suppressed truths. The river’s response isn’t forgiveness but transformative burden: algae blossoms across Elias’s scars while Aris’s hair whitens instantaneously, visual markers of their new roles as living witnesses.

This denouement avoids facile redemption, instead embracing ongoing accountability. Consider the final haunting tableau: Aris waist-deep in newly restored wetlands, recording migratory bird calls while tribal youth rebuild fish weirs upstream. The composition deliberately echoes the melancholy hope in Strejken’s labor solidarity finales, yet rooted in hydro-spiritual continuity. Veleskov holds the shot until the river’s surface perfectly stills, reflecting clouds like liquid sky—a fragile equilibrium requiring eternal vigilance.

Perhaps the film’s most revolutionary act lies in centering indigenous knowledge not as mystical plot device but viable jurisprudence. When Kwáni declares "Rivers sentence, humans merely testify," he articulates an environmental ethics more radical than any courtroom drama. In this aspect, The Forbidden River flows beyond cinema into ceremonial space—a cinematic potlatch where colonial narratives are not just contested but ceremonially dismantled, their toxins filtered through the gills of story.

With this monumental work, Veleskov has crafted what future scholars may call Hydro-Cinema: a filmmaking mode where water isn’t setting but sentient narrative architect. Its lingering power flows from recognizing that in an age of ecological collapse, reconciliation requires submersion—not merely in water, but in the drowned histories we’ve pretended not to see swirling beneath our feet.