Rivers in film can be powerful symbols. As physical features, they are both setting and environment, sometimes an antagonist, sometimes an entire character. They can be engines of plot all to themselves.
Sometimes a river is a goal, or a means to goal. Sometimes it’s an obstacle which guards the goal and must be overcome.
All this could be said for other geographical features such as mountains or oceans (and those may get their own articles someday). But a river provides a unique factor of movement — inexorable, nearly uncontrollable movement, always in one direction. There is no “downstream” at sea.
In this way, river films are similar to train films (also subject of a future article), but trains lack the crucial element of wildness. To one degree or another, rivers bring with them an elemental danger and unpredictability, which throws gasoline on whatever plot you might be having at the time.
The below ten films — ranked by the Flickchart globals — best exemplify the benefits of stories set on a moving vein of water.
For the purposes of this article, we are limiting our conversation to river journeys. Films such as The River or A River Runs Through It do not make (in our opinion) full enough use of the river qua river as a cinematic constraint and plot mechanism. Rather, those are stories that happen to take place in or near rivers.
We want the river to be taking us somewhere, whether the characters want it to or not.
Chime in in the comments if we missed an obvious one.
Ask any American about stories (of any medium) that take place on rivers, and they will immediately think of Huck Finn (or maybe Tom Sawyer if they’re confused). Huck and Jim on a raft on the Mississippi have become a quintessential American image: a ragged and rebellious semi-orphaned white boy and an escaped enslaved Black man, each looking for freedom, each defining it differently, and each helping the other with adorable naivete.
Their adventures, ever-so-loosely coupled and the very definition of “picaresque,” illustrate perfectly the power of river-based storytelling. The river is a destination, a vehicle, a murderer, a savior, a plot convenience, an obstacle to be overcome, a political delineation, and an awe-inducing elemental backdrop for the characters to simply sit and ponder.
That said, out of the many adaptations of this story in film, this one, directed by Michael Curtiz, has the highest ranking on Flickchart, and it still only barely breaks the top ten. Despite its reputation as a “classic”, it somehow fails to transcend its time and place. But it features a truly great river.
One of the most remembered (if not exactly celebrated) movies from the 90s’ brief revival of the “monstrous nature” genre. Along with Lake Placid and Deep Blue Sea, this film, directed by Luis Llosa, was part of an attempt (a successful attempt, financially speaking) to return to the Jaws-style blockbuster, this time with plenty of Clinton-era CG gloss and earnestness.
The plot consists of J-Lo, Ice Cube, and Owen Wilson (triumvirate rulers of 90s pop culture), taking a rust-bucket boat down the Amazon where they meet Jon Voight doing a terrible accent. What starts out as Creature from the Black Lagoon becomes more like King Kong times Lifeboat divided by subtlety and aesthetics.
The unlikable characters and inanity of the creature effects ultimately sink the film, but it must be heralded as an excellent example of an arduous river journey: the city-folk nature documentarians, hemmed in by the wilds that they dare to claim the right to mansplain; the inexorable liquid locomotive that drives them to the final slithering confrontation; the river itself a kind of serpentine antagonist; the titular snake a kind of embodying spirit of all the river’s wild and unknowable might.
The River Wild, directed by Curtis Hanson, uses the river in a similar fashion as Huck and Jim did: simultaneously a pervasive plot device and a metaphor. It mostly works.
Gail (Meryl Streep) and Tom (David Strathairn) are having trouble in their marriage. So to clear her head, she takes their son (Joseph Mazzello) and dog (Buffy) on a whitewater rafting trip down Idaho’s Salmon River. A trip which is first crashed by her nerd husband, and then by fugitives Kevin Bacon and John C. Reilly, who proceed to screw everything up by kidnapping everyone.
Meryl Streep’s backstory is that she is a trained whitewater guide and has a deep history with this particular river. In the first act, she is confronting the fact that her marriage is dissolving, and it is a telling character choice that her method of processing this is be to return to a violent, elemental landscape which presents a difficult-to-survive challenge but one for which she has been trained. Unlike her marriage.
How many of us do those same sorts of things? A self-imposed challenge to remind us of whatever competence we do have, in a world that only celebrates a tiny, boring set of capabilities? Video games, neighborhood basketball, church choir, model airplanes — adults are forever shrinking the playing field down to something smaller than Life Itself. And Meryl Streep’s character does no different.
But her “shrunken playing field” just happens to be a powerful, elemental, raging river. It is here that she will play out her metaphorical battle against middle-age frustration and self-perceived impotence.
Our second “monster” film in this list and the third involving a raft, Piranha was Joe Dante‘s attempt to make a Jaws also-ran, which almost accidentally became beloved in its own right.
The premise is that during the Vietnam Conflict, one of the U.S. government’s brainstorms was to genetically engineer a species of piranha which could thrive in North Vietnam’s climate. In typical government fashion, the project was cancelled and abandoned, leaving all the fish in a concrete pool, just waiting for some idiots to accidentally let them loose into a nearby river.
What follows is a kind of lazy, exposition-laden river chase as our heroes (a drunk guide, a naïve skiptracer, and a burned-out scientist) attempt to prevent the school of mutants from making it past a dam and into a children’s summer camp.
The river journey is, honestly, only a feature of the film’s second act. But the river comes to represent not just the conveyance to the next plot point, but also the titular monster. Our heroes, their Jeep destroyed, are forced to ride upon the very thing that they must get downstream to warn everyone about. This is powerful irony, and it ensures continuous close contact between them and the deadly threat, which makes for a very tense and arduous situation.
Sometimes the river takes a more passive role in the plot. Sometimes it’s “merely” a setting where the story takes place. But even then, the subtle bottled-up energy and inexorable movement forward make their presence felt.
In 1930s Egypt, a group of British fancies, all in typically Christie-ian inter-tanglements, board a steamship for a holiday down the Nile River. Among them is legendary Belgian detective Hercule Poirot, who comes in handy when bodies start dropping with inscrutable motives and details.
This film was remade in 2022, but we give pride of place here to this one (directed by John Guillermin), which is higher ranked. Peter Ustinov turns in a wonderful performance, but one is reminded that his interpretation of the character remains relatively stable regardless of the setting.
It is something of a staple of the Poirot stories for there to be some constraining force on the murder scene and suspects; it is the engine that drives the tension. After all, how is Death on the Nile all that different in setting than Murder on the Orient Express?
So this film’s presence in our list, at the very least, identifies the river journey as a crackerjack setting for parlor mysteries. Like we’ll see in Apocalypse Now, the river itself actually does very little to directly help or hinder our heroes. It is merely the medium, chugging along, strong but passive, it’s purpose being mainly to make sure nobody can simply walk away.
Jumping over a thousand places in the Global Rankings, Deliverance, directed by John Boorman, catapults us into the “prestige” section of our list. Deliverance demonstrates just how powerful rivers can be in a film, both literally and metaphorically.
Four men, city-dwelling bros with an idealistic view of the world outside the Atlanta metro area, set out to take a canoe trip down the Cahulawassee River, a gesture of return-to-nature in an era that (if you can imagine it) was rapidly consuming green spaces in the name of progress and capitalism.
What they find is that the situation is worse than they thought: They have become too separated from the atavistic truth lived by the human male in the wild. They underestimate what must be done to truly return to a state of nature. They learn too late that there can be no tourists.
Throughout the course of this realization, the river is their chariot. Scenes and moments and vignettes are played out in little dreamlike chunks, across the whole spectrum of experience from the sublime to the horrific, like an It’s a Small World ride from hell.
And just like life (and just like It’s a Small World), the only way out is through. Their only hope is to continue downstream, to fully commit to reaching whatever “deliverance” is intended for them. It cannot be resisted. You’d have better luck damming the Cahulawassee.
John Huston‘s The African Queen is a classic blending of genres. Part adventure, part colonial culture-clash, part mismatched romantic comedy, part desperate wartime heist, the film still manages to hold itself together around an industrial-strength spine of Bogart–Hepburn chemistry and a clear, simple story.
In 1914 German East Africa, an effete British missionary teams up with with a brutish Canadian steamboat captain to escape from the explosion of violence that marks the start of the Great War.
Their avenue of escape is the (fictional) Ulanga River, the apotheosis of all cinematic rivers everywhere: raging whitewater in some areas, stagnant and swampy in others, in still others lush and teeming with life.
This assortment of riparian facets fuels the river’s metaphor for the somewhat reluctant burgeoning romance on board. The completion of the river’s journey in its terminating lake coincides with the culmination of our heroes’ courtship, as well as the realization of their improvised naval mission.
Imagine how less satisfying it would be if the final act took place at merely some other spot downstream. No, for this story, the plot and the river must track the same course, all the way to the end.
Werner Herzog‘s Fitzcarraldo is NOT most famous for being about a boat on a river. It’s famous for being about a boat NOT being on a river.
Fitzcarraldo (Klaus Kinski) is an Irish expatriate in Peru, another in the swarm of foreign rubber exploiters that flooded the region in the early twentieth century. But for Fitz, it is not about rubber or even money for its own sake. Rather it is the means by which to bring opera, his one true passion, to the backwater metropolis of Iquitos.
He convinces himself that, due to the topography of the river system and the location of the remaining rubber claims, his best hope for success involves portaging his 320-ton steamship across two kilometers of hilly jungle to a different river.
The real life Iquitos is the world’s largest non-island city which cannot be reached by road. Until the invention of air travel, the rivers (the Amazon, the Nanay, and the Itaya) were the road.
This cultural and geographical context is required in order to even vaguely approach understanding the headspace that drives the characters in this film. A unique brand of madness grips Fitzcarraldo, the sum total of greed, cultural homesickness, and the complex arduousness that pervades the simple act of survival in Peru’s bizarre river kingdom.
In addition to its famous “definitely not a river” sequence, this film does have several fascinating sequences on the river itself. But we’re mainly including it in our list here because it shines a unique light on how the daily fact of arduous river journeys can devastate the already-threadbare coherence of human society and the soul.
In director Werner Herzog’s second entry in this list, the river (once again the Amazon) is cast as the no-man’s-land where the forces of the Old and New Worlds meet. The European hubris about the invincible, inevitable march of Christian colonialism finds itself dashed against a wild wall of water, jungle, and disease.
The film tells the (mostly) true story of a 16th-century cadre of conquistadors, priests, and noblewomen who bushwhack their way though the South American jungle in search of El Dorado.
They build rafts to carry them and their horses and cannons, thinking that this will ease their journey. But the disconnection from land society, as well as the pressures of simple survival, exacerbate the inherent madness and greed in the men, especially their ersatz leader Aguirre (once again the indominable Klaus Kinski).
What one must keep in mind throughout this ordeal, even as we watch the river slowly torture the party to death, we know that ultimately, in the real world, depending how you keep score, the Spanish won. The actual Conquistadors, aided by disease and luck, were for the most part successful in using Euro-Christian culture to bludgeon South American aboriginal cultures into, at best, displacement.
Despite all of the strife and horrors we see visited upon the White Devils, we know it will have no significant dissuasive impact. The river and its own rallied forces of disease and luck will not be able to hold the invaders off. All that will happen is that a few of them will be made to pay.
At the top of our list is a film usually thought of as a “Vietnam” film, but in which the war is actually just a backdrop, a colorful and concrete setting for a psychedelic conversation about the nature of humanity and conscience. All powered by the dark majesty of the (fictional) Nung River.
In 1969, a burned-out Army covert operator (Martin Sheen) is ordered to assassinate a rogue special forces officer (Marlon Brando) who has “gone native” and is being worshipped as a god.
Based on Conrad’s The Heart of Darkness, the story is structured as a series of set pieces through which Captain Willard and his Navy escorts must pass as they putt-putt their way from the relative light and “ordinary” insanity of modern war, into realms much darker and weirder.
Exactly how much of what we see on the screen is intended as literal is unclear. But the fact that this trip takes place via river is essential to the film’s impact. If Willard’s journey had taken place on foot, the dreamlike quality would not have been achieved. Recall that Saving Private Ryan also tells the story of a semi-picaresque wartime journey, but its effect is much more prosaic and “non-dreamlike” (not an insult). This is at least partly due to it taking place almost entirely on foot.
The floating-over-water aspect of the means of travel allows the journey to attain an unreal, hypnogogic quality. This “post-conscious” framing pours gasoline on the symbolism and allegory with which the script is absolutely laden.
We love that this is the film to round out our list, because it may in fact be the pinnacle of this trope in action.
Rivers in film are more than just features of the landscape. When wielded correctly, they enable and empower whole classes of story and character, and they broaden the cinematographers palette in ways that would surprise no one who has witnessed an actual river’s beauty and violence in person.
Our thesis is that rivers are best utilized to be in some way a trial for our heroes – maybe not an outright obstacle, but its undeniable power should be brought to bear in all its terrifying might. It should in some sense make our hero’s journey (to use our chosen word) “arduous.”
We want to see our hero sweat. Let’s make them fight a river.