Deep (Like the Ocean)

Seven minutes long, and the chorus keeps coming back, the way the ocean it's named after does. It's the band's most-played song, off a record of ceremony songs recorded in a studio. When it reached me it already had a past: another artist had started a forty-second visualizer and left mid-production, and the band wanted his idea kept. None of his footage is in the film. A few scenes grow out of where he was heading, and the concept was worked out between the band and me from there. The bigger problem came next. The song borrows from ceremony music across the world, and the film had to do the same without turning into a costume party. So there are Andean mountains, there's Judeo-Christian myth, there's Hindu cosmology, and there's the plain cosmic stuff, oceans and rivers and the making of things, each given its own room and all of it lit in one language. The narrative doesn't land on the first watch. It isn't meant to. It's built for the second and the third, for a viewer who would rather be led further in than shown the way out. One commenter called it a visual meditation. That's about right.