The Call of Water
2021 · 19m · USA
Directed by Kaya Tone
Tones: contemplative, mythic, surreal
On the eve of her family selling their ancestral land, Nadia is flung into the astral plane during a psychedelic trip and must commune with the Horned One — an embodiment of nature — to realize her responsibility to her homeland.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
Most scouts would see the psychedelic framework as window dressing for an eco-grief narrative, but Tone uses the astral plane not as metaphor but as *actual stakes* — the Horned One isn't a symbol, it's a negotiation partner, which completely scrambles what we expect from a land-loss story and makes it genuinely unhinged.
The film's visual language draws deliberately from pagan iconography and visionary cinema traditions, situating itself within a lineage of mystical realism that includes everything from Tarkovsky's spiritual landscapes to contemporary indigenous-futurism, executed with compositional care that earns its mythic register.
The decision to anchor the entire astral sequence through Nadia's physical presence — never letting the surrealism untether from her body and breath — transforms what could've been indulgent mysticism into something tactile and urgent, and that commitment to embodiment is what makes the inheritance plot actually *land*.
Reviews
Trapped Between Worlds
immaculately shot, filled with imagery that is at times beautiful and at times haunting