‘Styx’ asks what the privileged and well-prepared can sacrifice

Underlines tale of survival on the sea

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Wolfgang Fisher’s “Styx” makes for an interesting companion piece to Joe Penna’s “Arctic,” in that both films pit stoic Teutonic protagonists against the uncompromisingly harsh conditions of vast, surrounding nature.

But while Mads Mikkelsen’s crash-landed airplane pilot is subjected to an intense survival test in “Arctic,” only faltering for a moment in his commitment to save the fellow pilot who also crash-landed trying to rescue him, Susanne Wolff’s character takes on the challenges of navigating the open ocean by choice in “Styx,” and her moral dilemma constitutes the most crucial conflict in the film.

We’re introduced to Wolff as an emergency scene doctor, a German expatriate patching up auto accident victims on Gibraltar, and while that environment is both exotic and stark, with its roaming bands of wild monkeys and the towering Rock of Gibraltar appearing in the very first scenes of the film, our doctor is looking for an even more unique and formidable experience.

She sets off for Ascension Island, isolated in the Atlantic Ocean between the coasts of Africa and Brazil, a remote locale which she explains was systematically cultivated into a jungle by Charles Darwin, and she’s heading there alone, steering her own well-stocked sailing yacht boldly alongside towering oil tankers and through the turmoil of punishing storms.

Fisher devotes ample time to showing us the simple act of Wolff’s character loading up her ship, with her exhaustive preparations illustrating she knows nothing is simple, or easy, when it comes to ensuring you’re ready for the sea.

“Styx” arguably could have sustained an entire film on following our obviously experienced yachtswoman through all the nautical rituals to which she must necessarily adhere, each one signaled by the beeping of her waterproof watch, much like the daily wristwatch alarms Mikkelsen’s character used to set a routine for himself in “Arctic.”

But it’s when Wolff’s character encounters an overpopulated fishing boat, whose engines have stalled out and whose holds are taking on water, that she’s confronted with an emergency that she hadn’t planned for as a sailor. Her ethics as a doctor are tested when she realizes that help for the stranded crew won’t arrive in time, in spite of the Coast Guard receiving her transmissions.

It’s a none-too-subtle metaphor for the challenge facing first world society: how should the privileged and well-intentioned put the compassion they espouse into practice, to help those who will die without their resources?

Wolff’s character is a decent person who hectors both the Coast Guard and a nearby commercial vessel to come help, because while her vessel is capable of taking on a teenaged refugee named Kingsley (played affectingly by Gedion Oduor Wekesa), who swam out from his ship to reach her, she knows her small ship can’t carry all his crewmates.

The solution she finally arrives at is at once clever and obvious in retrospect, in how it weaponizes her own privilege to speed the recovery of the others, but the loss remains great enough that even the sight of Coast Guard boats skipping across the water offers no catharsis, either to Wolff’s character or to the audience.

I don’t think I’m spoiling anything by telling you that a movie named after the River Styx — which ferried the dead into the underworld in Greek myth — ends on a downbeat note, but getting there remains worth your while.