Narcose
2013 · 13m · France
Directed by Julie Gautier
Genres: documentary, experimental
Tones: contemplative, sensual, surreal
Apnea world champion Guillaume Néry undertakes a deep freedive on a single breath, and the film stages the interior, hallucinatory journey he experiences as nitrogen narcosis — the euphoric disorientation divers call 'raptures of the deep' — sets in. Shot entirely underwater by freediving performers, it weaves real diving with dreamlike visions: a wedding memory, 2D-animated underwater creatures, and a corps of dancers writhing in the depths.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
Gautier takes the most predictable source material — a record-breaking freedive — and somehow makes it weirder than experimental fiction by letting the hallucinatory state *become* the form itself; the 2D creatures and dancing bodies underwater aren't metaphors, they're what nitrogen does to the brain, and that refusal to aestheticize it into something prettier is genuinely unsettling.
A formally sophisticated work that locates itself in the lineage of embodied cinema and avant-garde documentary — the marriage of Néry's actual physiological state with choreographed movement and animation recalls both structural film and the dance-on-camera traditions, executed with the kind of underwater technical discipline that demands recognition as pure craft.
The entire gambit hinges on one decision: shooting underwater with breath-holding freedivers instead of animation or conventional staging, which collapses the distance between document and dream and makes every frame feel genuinely disoriented rather than designed — it's the constraint that generates the vision, not the other way around.
Reviews
A slightly eerie, but beautiful short film which really should be watched on a big screen.
Blends hauntingly beautiful underwater cinematography with a dreamlike narrative, capturing the delicate balance between tranquillity and danger that defines the underwater world.