Another documentary short! Here we go. Haulout. A man in the most remote Siberia waits in a shack for the walruses to gather. There are a lot of them. The film is deliberately ambiguous as it starts as to what exactly he’s doing, then at one point he opens the front door to his shack to find 95 thousand walruses gathered outside. It’s the best shot in an otherwise lacking film. Ultimately, there’s nothing beyond the message. The number of walruses is declining. The ice is melting. Global warming is killing us all. It treats these facts as a twist, left til the end in a series of captions, acting as if it’s keeping you in suspense, but instead it simply feels like disconnected shots of walruses and ice. It’s not even, then, exactly effective agitprop, resulting in a general sensation of “oh, ok then. Yeah I guess that’s bad”. But we knew that! I don’t think this is turning anyone’s opinions on climate change around, and for those who did already care about it (hi!), it doesn’t do much to shock you into further outrage or action. There’s too often a trend in artificial narrative in documentaries these days, but at least they have one.