Red Moon Tide (Lois Patiño, 2020) (Patreon)

This is the second feature, and the first fiction work, from Galician auteur Lois Patiño, whose short film Night Without Distance, from 2015, was in my estimation the single best entry in that year's Toronto International Film Festival. I was obviously quite interested to see what sort of direction he'd take with this, his first effort beyond the (loose) bounds of experimental documentary. And I was, of course, in for a number of surprises.

There is, to be sure, a general agreement that Red Moon Tide operates in two distinct registers. More specifically, the film establishes a somber, elegiac tone and that it evolves into a very different animal just after the halfway mark. Reading a few other reviews of Red Moon Tide, I seem to be a bit of an outlier. A lot of critics find the first part rather dull and predictable, in the sense that it sticks to well-trod "slow cinema" tropes, and only comes alive once it breaks out of its stately chrysalis. I beg to differ.

Red Moon Tide is essentially the story of an unseen seafarer named Rubio who held a very special place in his seaside community. While dozens of members of the community had lost their lives at sea, Rubio possessed a special, almost supernatural talent. He could hold his breath and dive down into the deepest trenches and retrieve the bodies of men lost at sea, providing their families with closure they'd otherwise never receive.

As the film begins, Rubio himself has just drowned. Of course, there is no one to retrieve his body. And various members of the community are shown standing around on rocky shores, or isolated in desolate parts of the village, delivering soliloquies about the history of Rubio and the dead men, without opening their mouths. We learn that Rubio was trying to kill a "monster," and a trio of witches are on the periphery of the action, offering their own explanation of events, stating, "the monster is the moon."

At this point, it seems clear that Patiño is working in the symbolic register. This is a film about a traumatized community, coping with the fact that, once Rubio (the retriever of death) is gone, Death has truly triumphed. And Rubio, trying to face off against the "monster," was a way of understanding a need to go to the very source of death, to try to fight it -- to do the impossible -- rather than merely be its spiritual janitor. "The monster is the moon." The tides claim the seafarers, and this is simply the cycle of life.

But wait. 

The witches are then shown flipping through some Lovecraftian etchings of sea monsters through the ages, Leviathan and such. And the discourse shifts. It becomes clear that, in fact, there is a sea monster in this port, and Rubio was the only one brave enough to try and fight it. And at the end, with a screen saturated in filtered crimson light, Patiño actually shows us the bulbous beast of the deep. 

Your mileage may vary,  but personally I felt like I'd been watching one of the best films of the year (whatever that means in 2020) only to receive an unexpected pie in the face. On Twitter, I actually compared Red Moon Tide to this similar ditty by Flight of the Conchords.