‘How Deep Is Your Love’ Review: A Mischievous Documentary Dive Into an Unfamiliar Ecosystem

variety.com:

Guy Lodge Film Critic Around ninety percent of life forms in the deep sea have yet to be named by humans, British director Eleanor Mortimer informs us in the course of her documentary “How Deep Is Your Love.” It’s a statistic somehow comforting in its vagueness — how, after all, can we put an exact figure on what is unknown to us — and humbling in its vastness, a reminder that we still don’t own huge stretches of the globe we profess to run.

Across history, any number of explorers, scientists and storytellers have been fascinated by the essential, alien hostility of the ocean to our species, and its enduring status as a place we can only visit but never settle.

Mortimer joins those ranks with a film that functions both as awestruck spectacle and anxious warning — joining a literal boatload of marine biologists racing to demystify an ecosystem before deep-sea miners destroy it.

Having premiered at the True/False documentary festival before making its European bow in CPH:DOX, “How Deep Is Your Love” is a warm, approachable entry in the growing eco-documentary subgenre that should net considerable distributor interest on the strength of its plaintive environmental message and its frequently dazzling imagery — as Mortimer’s filmmaking abets the biologists’ mission to capture and chronicle an iridescent array of never-before-seen creatures down below.