Black­fish

The focus of this eco­log­i­cal­ly engaged doc­u­men­tary is orca Tilikum, who made head­lines in 2010 upon killing his train­er, Dawn Brancheau, dur­ing an exer­cise at Florida’s Sea­World theme park. Was Dawn, like the bear-munched sub­ject of Wern­er Herzog’s Griz­zly Man play­ing a dan­ger­ous game with nature? The dubi­ous sug­ges­tion from com­pa­ny big­wigs that Brancheau was the archi­tect of her own down­fall (by sport­ing a too-long pony­tail) prompt­ed skep­ti­cal direc­tor Gabriela Cow­perth­waite to inves­ti­gate further.

Cow­perth­waite traces the ori­gins of the sto­ry back to 1983, when Tilikum was first cap­tured and con­signed to life in an aquat­ic amuse­ment park. Mix­ing upset­ting archive footage of Tilikum’s mal­treat­ment with informed com­ment from sci­en­tists and regret­ful ear­ly par­tic­i­pants, the direc­tor makes a con­vinc­ing case against the cap­tiv­i­ty of whales and sug­gests, trou­bling­ly, that Tilikum’s enforced impound­ment may have influ­enced destruc­tive actions; though the whale was per­form­ing in 2010, Brancheau was actu­al­ly his third human victim.

Black­fish chan­nels right­eous ire at Tilikum’s uneth­i­cal treat­ment, but it’s less suc­cess­ful in its attempts to build a con­spir­a­cy thriller nar­ra­tive, start­ing with the dou­ble-bluff open­ing sequence of mis­matched audio and video which devi­ous­ly sug­gests we’re about to actu­al­ly wit­ness the death of Brancheau (we don’t). It’s a queasy, sen­sa­tion­al­is­tic slice of audi­ence manip­u­la­tion that com­pro­mis­es the ensu­ing film’s stri­dent moral focus.

Tilikum’s first killings are sketchi­ly addressed and while Cow­perth­waite is under­stand­ably eager to por­tray the water­park indus­try as a men­da­cious cov­er-up out­fit, she fails to pro­vide a com­pelling por­trait of how they are struc­tured or who should be held account­able. The lack of any robust inter­ro­ga­tion extends to the lives of the train­ers; one feels fur­ther insight into their moti­va­tions would have made for far rich­er viewing.