Want to feel even worse about the ghastly direction in which our world appears to be headed? Then Irena Salina’s Flow is the movie for you! Salina’s eco-conscious documentary is packed with terrifying facts about the planet’s growing water crisis, and what she reveals isn’t just scary; it’s infuriating. As a work of call-to-arms eco-tainment, Flow sits somewhere between Davis Guggenheim’s An Inconvenient Truth and Laura Dunn’s The Unforeseen, mixing the former film’s onslaught of debilitating statistics with the latter’s elegiac tone. This movie was made to shake up viewers, and it does just that. Although there are no monsters or boogeymen onscreen, at times Flow is scarier than most standard horror movies.

Flow is crammed with statistical information—for an under-ninety-minute movie, maybe too much information—making it difficult to separate viewer ignorance from filmmaker overload. Salina covers so much ground that it threatens to overwhelm the average viewer. To her credit, she wants to cover all bases, but it doesn’t seem possible to do this with a topic so sprawling. That’s what makes this genre so difficult: too many examples and it becomes overkill, too much balance and the point becomes muddled, too much concentrated focus and the scope is lost. Salina bravely opts for the most difficult approach of all: to say everything. To her credit, Flow lands on the side of success, although at times it’s quite dizzying.

Some of the information that seems most obvious is also the hardest to swallow. It is well known that Nestle owns many different brands of bottled water, but it is still shocking to see a graphic of these labels connected so closely under one umbrella—not to mention the bottling water process itself. The bottled water industry always seemed questionable. Salina shows us why it’s a complete joke. It isn’t just the fact that this water is under-regulated to a startling degree. These companies actually invade small towns and communities and deplete their water sources. While Salina shows instances of this happening throughout the world, she mercifully shows inspiring examples of the citizens fighting back and regaining control of their community. With Flow, Salina doesn’t want to merely depress viewers; she wants to enlighten them and wake them up.

As hard as I try to shake my rising skepticism when I watch films of this ilk, I always find myself—perhaps as a defense mechanism—questioning the statistical validity of the facts being presented. Not that I don’t believe Salina. It’s just that, in these cases, the director always has a defiantly clear-cut agenda (note: this isn’t just a movie problem for me—the same rule applies to telemarketers, political candidates/pundits, Jehovah’s Witnesses, etc.). My instinct is to run when I feel like someone is preaching to me. And while I felt that way to some extent while watching Flow, I never checked out completely, for Salina’s mission felt more altruistic than self-serving.

Although it made me nauseous, Flow has inspired me to become more knowledgeable about this topic. Salina covers much ground, speaking politically, scientifically, spiritually, and ethically about what water means to us, and how we must not let it be co-opted by corporate entities. Hopefully the situation isn’t as dire as Salina makes us believe, because if it is, we’re in trouble.

(A minor side note: as much as I love Arvo Part’s “Alina,” I’d like to suggest that eco-friendly documentarians refrain from using it from this point forth. It’s starting to—pun intended—drain the piece of its power.)

— Michael Tully

(Flow opens in New York and Los Angeles today and will be expanding throughout the country in the coming weeks. Visit the film’s official website to watch a trailer and learn more.)

Tags: big business, community action, corporate greed, environmentalism, water crisis