Susanne Wolff in Styx (Film Movement)

Styx targets our complacency in regards to the plight of refugees while also making the point that the sheer volume of said refugees exhausts our capabilities and compassion. It is straightforward, clever, and makes it point concisely without preaching. It also, inadvertently, falls into the trap of skimping on the development of the non-white character while focusing closely on the white protagonist. Regardless, it’s a pretty good, pretty damning film.

The main and really only character for most of the running time is Rike (Susannah Wolff), a young German doctor who embarks from Gibraltar on a solo sailing voyage to Ascension Island, which was actually terraformed by Charles Darwin (look it up, it’s true). We first encounter her efficiently treating a car accident victim in Germany. We next see her on a sailboat preparing for the journey. There’s a wonderful shot of the boat from above. Its deck is covered with the food and equipment Rike is taking on her voyage, and everything is precisely laid out and categorized.

Unlike recent films depicting solo sailing events, Rike knows her stuff and is prepared and ready. Which is a relief, to say the least. Considering films such as All Is Lost and The Mercy, one wonders why anyone would attempt such a voyage at all when it clearly results in existential crisis and death. In fact, the first hour focuses on the mechanics of sailing in fairly intricate detail, and Rike is very much up to the task. She’s even manages to pencil in a swim in the ocean and breaks for tea and some light reading. She has the knowledge, mental acuity, and physical stamina for the task. And she appears very content to be alone. So, there is no existential trauma regarding being alone in the vast breadth of the ocean. Rike is quite, quite content.

Things change when, the morning after a gale, she finds she is within sight of an overloaded fishing trawler filled with African migrants calling for help, and some are jumping in the water attempting to reach her. She calls the coast guard. She is thanked for the information and told to wait for help because she doesn’t have the means to save them and may instead endanger them. She does as she is told, but she slowly realizes that the coast guard is not prioritizing the situation in the least, if it plans to come at all. Eventually she takes on one exhausted teenage boy (Gedion Oduor Wekesa) who swims to her boat, and he insists on her going back for the rest of the people, which, of course, she can’t do because she is one woman on a small sailing vessel.

Here the metaphor comes into sharp relief. These characters are clearly symbols. One can be competent and compassionate but can only do so much as an individual, and Rike does what she can, while the young boy is clearly right to be frustrated. As metaphors, they match. But director/co-writer Wolfgang Fischer tries to make a larger point. He grafts the entire West (of the bourgeois variety) and the whole of the, let’s say, non-Western world onto these two characters. And that doesn’t hold.

One reason is the boy, whose name is Kingsley, enters the film two thirds of the way and spends at least 10 minutes unconscious. He has a very strong motive, to save his friends, but he has no back story to vaunt him past being simply symbolic. Not so Rike. With her, abetted by a tight, focused performance by Wolff, there is enough individuality and free will that she simply doesn’t work as a metaphor or a symbol of anything else but herself. So, in attempting to delineate the disparity of the affluent West and an impoverished, needy population, Fischer falls into the trap of focusing on the white experience at the expense of, in this case, the black African experience.

That being said and taken into account, Styx is a well-made, compassionate film with a compelling lead performance by Wolfe and is worth checking out. It proves that good films can be made about successful sailors as well unsuccessful ones.