Deadweight

Axel Koenzen’s oceangoing debut feature, a Finnish-German co-production, premiered in the Forum section at the Berlin International Film Festival. Latest in a welcome flurry of oceangoing pictures that plunge viewers into the hard-knock realities of nautical life, Axel Koenzen’s enigmatically elliptical debut Deadweight positions itself at the more challenging end of the cinematic spectrum. Taking its tenor from an inscrutable lead performance by Tommi Korpela as the taciturn, grizzled and broodingly morose captain of a troubled container vessel, it’s strong on realism but deliberately uninvolving in terms of plot. (Neil Young, The Hollywood Reporter)