If one were to conjure an impression of the apocalypse, it might be in the heart of sound — a detonation so vast and infinite that all imaginable existence would cease. Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove lent no little irony to the proceedings of annihilation when it overlaid its closing montage of nuclear warfare with Vera Lynn’s giddily eschatological “We’ll Meet Again,” mocking the unity of the soul against utter atomic oblivion. But this ironic texture is not lost within a very different film altogether. Carlos Casas’ Krakatoa, predating the man-made horrors of the 20th century, dramatizes the most consequential natural disaster of the previous one; arguably the first global event that laid the foundations for ecological consciousness and seeded an appreciation of humanity’s intrinsic connectedness, the 1883 eruption of Indonesia’s Krakatoa volcano devastated tens of thousands of lives in the region, sending pulses of flaming magma spewing into the atmosphere. Although most notorious for producing the loudest known sound — a staggering 172 decibels — in human history, Krakatoa remains a legendary sonic phenomenon, captured only by recordings of the pressure waves it generated in its aftermath and by the dwindling ochre skies worldwide in the ensuing months.
The eruptions feature less as money shots in Krakatoa, serving instead as scaffolds for its contemplative metaphysical landscapes. Capturing the fateful moments of the eruption which eventually collapsed the volcano into a caldera, the film hovers over the idyllic waters between Java and Sumatra. Its silent protagonist is a fisherman named Kesuma (Roni Hensilayah), whose seasoned visage boasts a youthful disposition that’s etched off by the plumes of dust that soon engulf him. As Kesuma spends his days on a vast bamboo raft, oblivious to his terrible fate, Krakatoa’s mise-en-scène shines through in Benjamín Echazarreta’s disquietingly radiant compositions. The fisherman subsists on his catch, a life of repetition and self-subsistence; the sea appears boundless, its openness and isolation intimating a similar ambiguity in time. It is 1883, days and minutes before the end; it is also the present day, with Kesuma clad in a modern T-shirt inscribed with runic characters. The slight temporal slippages further hint at a future yet to arrive, as the end times loom imminent over the doomed soul, onboard his floating home.
Casas’ previous feature, the masterful Cemetery (2019), was a phantasmatic meditation on both the permanence of the soul as well as the limits of cinematic representation, following an elephant in its final journey to a mythical graveyard. Where it turned, perhaps, to the stars in its consecration of nature’s unbidden sanctity, Krakatoa descends into the earth’s very core and down to the microscopic, microcosmic origins of all things. As volcanic ash rains over land and sea, our lone avatar staggers ashore, along a beach, into a jungle, and through the planetary crust. In a final gesture of awe or sacrifice, he escapes time altogether. Taken as a parable for the Anthropocene, the film faithfully documents its anxious longing for spiritual redemption, failing which the only recourse left is the path toward total negation. The immensity of Krakatoa’s images portends their starkly cataclysmic ends, leading eventually to this all-consuming void. Enmeshed in anachronism yet awash with the signifiers of a history yet to be tainted by the specter of environmental collapse, the film mounts a brazen final act, disintegrating into the purest flickers of being and nothingness. With Nicolas Becker’s spectacular sound design approximating the very ineffability of destruction, so, too, do we prostrate before the blind embers of creation.
Published as part of IFFR 2026 — Dispatch 5.
Comments are closed.