Serenity (2019)

Steven Knight's Serenity arrives with the confidence of a film that believes it is several films at once. Matthew McConaughey plays Baker Dill, a fishing boat captain on a sun-bleached island, locked in a private war with an elusive yellowfin tuna he has named Justice. Anne Hathaway appears as his ex-wife, offering ten million dollars to drown her abusive husband. The dialogue is florid, the plotting is baroque, and the eventual reveal, involving a video game designed by a grieving boy, lands with the sound of a chair being dragged across a floor. It was a commercial and critical ruin, which is its own kind of distinction.

The film's social consciousness is thin to the point of vanishing. Djimon Hounsou and Diane Lane populate the edges of the frame, but this remains a star-driven white-led noir, and race is never a subject the screenplay cares to touch. There is no queer presence, no environmental grievance lodged at the tuna or the sea, no commentary on wealth, no body-positive register, and no framing of the boy's game design as any kind of neurological condition. Hathaway has spoken off-screen about the male gaze shaping her femme fatale, though nothing in the finished film argues that case.

This is a twisty meta-thriller that wants to disorient us, not instruct us. It has no sermon to deliver and no lesson to impart; its ambitions are entirely formal and mostly unsuccessful. As a document of progressive sentiment, it is nearly blank. As a movie, it is a curiosity best observed from a safe distance, like weather.