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True Detective's Rust Cohle Narrates an Existential Deep-Sea Dive

Filmmaker Alex Soloviev shoots the deep ocean like a philosophical Russian sci-fi flick.
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The deep sea has long been a place to capture the imagination of filmmakers, with its mystery, wonder, and otherworldly creatures—it's no surprise that it's a rich source of inspiration. Filmmaker Alex Soloviev has made full use of the exotic appearance of the midnight ocean in a stunningly shot short film, Deep Underwater, which features the goings-on of the deep sea as if it were an existential sci-fi flick.

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Not only is it soundtracked by some spooky cosmic sounds courtesy of Astropilot's "Event Horizon," but added to the brooding intensity is narration by everyone's favorite speculative realist philosopher-cop from season one of True Detective, Rust Cohle. Specifically, this monologue riffing on time and eternity:

It's like in this universe we process time linearly forward. But outside of our space time from what would be a fourth dimensional perspective time wouldn't exist. And from that vantage could we attain it? We see our space time would look flattened. Like a single sculpture of matter and superposition of every place it ever occupied. Our sentience is just cycling through our lives like carts on a track. See everything outside our dimension that's eternity. Eternity looking down on us. Now to us its a sphere but to them its a circle.

It comes across like underwater Tarkovsky, with the slow-mo footage, shot in 14-bit RAW using the Magic Lantern firmware, making the sea creatures, plants, and rock formations seem even more like alien forms from strange and distant planets. "On the surface you can see only sequences of moments. If you will dive deep underwater you may meet an eternity. Time does not exist there. And eternity is looking on us," Soloviev muses.

Click here for more from Alex Soloviev.

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