Riverrun

 All nature is one individual, whose parts vary in infinitely many ways.
— Baruch Spinoza 

When the body becomes landscape, healing may consist in relinquishing mastery over oneself. With Riverrun, Philippe Parreno’s first feature-length fiction film, the French artist brings cinema into the realm of installation art: the narrative fragments, time slows down, images become distorted, and nature ceases to be a backdrop, emerging instead as an autonomous presence, at times disturbing, at others almost consoling. Trees writhe, animals display unnaturally luminous eyes, while Lucy’s body responds to stimuli with jolts and contractions that seem to elude her will. It becomes impossible to determine where the symptom ends and a different form of perception begins. 

Charlotte Gainsbourg, with her vulnerable, hybrid physicality, magnificently conveys this loss of sovereignty; Vicky Krieps, Ángela Molina and Zoë Saldaña help construct a female universe in which care, observation and transformation do not necessarily coincide with a return to normality. The women in Riverrun are not merely figures subjected to distress: they become the site where a different relationship with the living world is explored. One might discern here a specifically female possibility of losing and rediscovering contact with nature, provided it is not reduced to a biological essence. Rather, it is the possibility of breaking free from the notion of an autonomous subject, separate from the world and intent on exerting control over it. 

It is no coincidence that Riverrun entrusts women—from the patient and the female doctors to her friend—with the entire apparatus of care and transformation. In our cultural tradition, women have been identified with nature, with the capacity to give birth to and nurture life, but also with a body deemed mysterious, unruly and in need of control. Parreno may be turning this age-old association on its head: no longer woman as nature to be governed, but woman as a subject capable of losing and rediscovering a relationship with the living world beyond the categories of normality. Without idealising a specifically female intimacy with the earth, the film allows a fertile contradiction to emerge: that which gives life can also destabilise; that which cares can also exert control. And perhaps Lucy’s metamorphosis begins precisely when the body ceases to be territory in need of correction and becomes a world over which no one can claim ownership. 

The mind inevitably turns to Lars von Trier’s Melancholia, to those unsettling images of Justine, naked and immersed in the landscape’s unreal light, as though seeking an impossible fusion with the world through nature. Yet it is above all the plant tendrils that ensnare her legs that make this relationship ambiguous: nature attracts and restrains, promises reconciliation while simultaneously preventing movement. In Riverrun, too, the boundary between surrender and constraint, belonging and the loss of self, remains unstable. If Justine seems to find a paradoxical consonance with the cosmos in the imminence of the end, Lucy undergoes a metamorphosis in which the landscape becomes a condition of existence. In both films, nature is no consoling refuge: it is a force that seduces, engulfs and unsettles the human illusion of being separate from the world. 

In Riverrun, the electronic score by Invisible Mountain, the duo formed by Nicolas Becker and LEXX, is fundamental: sounds, noises and vibrations do not simply accompany the images but seem to emanate from the very environment that produces them. Music merges with the landscape, amplifies its anomalies and makes audible what language cannot express. Nature does not speak: it vibrates, shifts and invades the perceptual space. Deprived of reassuring narrative coordinates, the viewer is compelled to share in this instability. 

The project’s meaning comes into sharper focus in the closing caption, which presents Lucy H as a territory to be preserved through strict regulations, including those governing its waters and their integrity. 

The real-world reference is El Almendral, Parreno’s project transforming a roughly 30-hectare plot of land north of the Tabernas Desert in Andalusia into an ecosystem that serves simultaneously as a natural habitat and a film set. Cameras and sensors record the landscape’s transformations in real time, while technologies for harvesting atmospheric moisture, harnessing solar and wind energy, and interventions to promote biodiversity contribute to reshaping its conditions. Yet the most radical choice is a legal one: the project grants the territory a form of self-ownership, recognising a status independent of human ownership. Images are thus cultivated like the produce of the land, as part of a potentially endless work that changes with the seasons and with the living world. This is the real-life project that reverberates through Riverrun’s closing contract: not a mere ecological statement, but an attempt to imagine a world in which nature is no longer simply a resource to be managed, but an entity whose right to exist on its own terms must be preserved. 

The reference to Parreno’s territorial project thus transforms the protagonist’s metamorphosis into an aesthetic, ecological and political question: what would happen if a territory were no longer regarded as property to be exploited, but as an entity to be protected in its autonomy? And what if the same logic were applied to human beings, freeing them from the expectation that they must constantly be corrected, normalised and restored to a recognisable state of functionality? 

Parreno offers neither an ecological fable nor an alternative therapy. He shifts depression from the individual to the environment, from suffering to duration, rejecting the consolation of resilience presented as triumph. The closing contract nevertheless introduces a paradox: preservation means protection, but it also entails setting limits and imposing rules. Can Lucy’s freedom truly coincide with this form of protection, or does it risk becoming yet another way of administering the living world? 

This is the most fertile contradiction in a film that, while occasionally risking the loss of its own force through deliberate opacity, finds a form consistent with its premise in the fusion of cinema, installation and landscape. The point is not to return to what one once was, but to imagine an existence that no longer needs to coincide with a defined figure. Lucy does not necessarily recover: she becomes territory, continuity, world. 

The body is our general medium for having a world.
— Maurice Merleau-Ponty