This feels like a pretty observation of a unique community that ultimately doesn’t really say anything.

The island of Mandø off the coast of Denmark is only 8km² and is surrounded by dikes to stop the sea encroaching on the land. It used to be home to 130 people and now there are fewer than 30. You can see why – in the 17th century storms wiped out the entire village drowning everyone. Whenever there is a confluence of wind, storm and high tide, the island is in danger of flooding and relies heavily on the stability of the dikes.

Juan Palacios’s observational lens follows a small group of people. There is farmer Gregers, who had youthful dreams of being a pilot but was obligated to stay on his parents’ farm to help them with the work. He is now probably in his 40s, trying to get on the Danish version of Farmer Wants a Wife and low-key complaining to everyone, even his dog, about how hopeless it is. There is also Mie, who turns 99 and then 100 during filming, and the woman who runs the general store that proudly advertises itself as Denmark’s Smallest Supermarket.

We see bird watchers come, archaeologists mapping the site of the original village, and open topped tour buses come through. We see lots of shots of the moon and individuals tell of how they have trouble sleeping when the moon is full or when it is new. There is obviously some gentle point being made about climate change and the fate of places like this but I’m not sure that we are being told anything particularly interesting about it.

The underlying feeling I got was of the hubris of humans to inhabit such a precarious place, and even to persist in rebuilding when everybody drowned. You see the tragedy for farmers like Gregers – and this story will be played out all over the world where an industry dies or a place becomes uninhabitable – who knows that he has a losing bet. All of his life, wealth and potential is tied up in land that will probably be submerged by the sea within the next 20 years. His young nephew (I assume as we are given little to no detail) asks him why he can’t just move to the mainland and we understand how impossible this would seem.

Although the film is beautiful, I started to get the feeling that we were seeing set pieces directed to make a particular point or to look pretty.  Gregers holds conversations with his dog as he drives that conveniently give us information and voice some feelings. Gregers sets out to go duck hunting and then stands in the middle of the water with his decoy ducks looking pensively out to the horizon. It felt a little crafted, which is not necessarily a bad thing, but it stopped me feeling like I was seeing under the skin of the people who live there. It felt like an outsider’s view without much hope or context.