Filippou and Tsangari’s screenplay never explicitly mentions why the men are out at sea together and it takes a while before each character registers as a separate entity and even then there’s never a sense they might have a life beyond the time they spend together onscreen. But this film is not about individual stories, experiences and relationships so much as the mechanisms and patterns that emerge whenever and wherever people are together. Just like a cubist painting, what happens in the film doesn’t necessarily resemble real life in a narrow documentary sense but instead gives the viewer something else: a chance to consider certain behavior from various sides and on a more abstract level.

The Hollywood Reporter