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Director Andrew Walsh’s microbudget indie film thrives on being a mumblecore character journey that is unabashedly aimless with its narrative. It’s not so much a linear narrative so much as it is a series of encounters a small journey our character Eleanor experiences. She’s in search of stability and has a hard time adjusting in a city where she comes across nothing but oddballs and unusual characters. Eleanor is an admitted victim of her own being as she spends so much time self sabotaging her own life, and can never figure it out.
Arriving in Melbourne from Adelaide, Australia, young Eleanor takes a room in a boarding house with a drunk roommate, Roy, who has his regrets and failures in life. A young drifter running from her past searches for happiness in Melbourne, Eleanor finds a community among fellow outcasts.
Even in the end, Eleanor is someone that is perpetually her own worst enemy, which makes her a protagonist that some audiences may empathize with or root against, in the end. Olivia Fildes performance is very good and she’s a natural in this morally grey wandering soul who can never really figure out what she wants for herself or for the small amount of people in her life. Walsh keeps her back story considerably ambiguous with a lot of her back story kept considerably hazy. Even in the end we’re never quite sure who she is, which sadly hinders the film considerably.
It would have been great to garner some insight in to her psychology or justification for a lot of the moves she makes socially and intimately. Sometimes the moves she makes feel inexplicable as a means of inorganically merely moving the narrative forward. That’s no reflection on Wilde’s who is very good as the center of Walsh’s whole film. “How Deep is the Ocean” is engaging and entertaining enough, considering its low budget, and I appreciated Walsh’s tight camera work, overall. It’s a worthwhile creative work that should satisfy fans of character studies and coming of age dramas.