Atlantics

Name: Atlantics
Director: Mati Diop
Released: 2019

Mati Diop

2019

Synopsis

Arranged to marry a rich man, young Ada is crushed when her true love goes missing at sea during a migration attempt — until a miracle reunites them.

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Recommendations

100
The Telegraph
It has a slippery elegance, an ambitious way of nudging its nose into magic realism, and some unforgettable images.
90
Screen Daily
An intense romance notable for the craft of the filmmaking and Diop’s original approach to complex issues of love, loss and the forces for change that can rise from the ashes of tragedy.
83
IndieWire
Diop’s first feature doesn’t always fit together from a narrative perspective, but it musters such an absorbing vision of an alienated seaside life that not everything needs to add up for the atmosphere to take hold.
83
The Playlist
It bears the aesthetic and thematic hallmarks of an expertly rendered film with an impressively nuanced subjectivity.
80
The Guardian
Atlantique may not be perfect, but I admired the way that Diop did not simply submit to the realist mode expected from this kind of material, and yet neither did she go into a cliched magic-realist mode, nor make the romantic story the film’s obvious centre. Her film has a seductive mystery.
80
The Hollywood Reporter
A lot of ideas about class, post-imperialism and spiritual values peek up out of the surface of the text, but they're not developed with much rigor compared to what Diop conjured with more intensity and less time in A Thousand Suns. All the same, this is a striking work.
80
CineVue
It doesn’t quite click, is too weird, leads to a lurch from one cinematic style to the other and fails to gel as a satisfying whole. Yet the director’s imaginative intention is apparent in the first shot.
70
TheWrap
If the narrative can sometimes wane, the film’s enveloping atmospherics remain tight throughout.