The North Sea, with its cold grey waters, is the world’s drabbest. Or so you might have thought, but this documentary featuring the Dutch diver and underwater cinematographer Peter van Rodijnen sets out to tackle the misconceptions. His stunning footage puts all the splendours of this stormy stretch of water on show, and his voiceover gives it an endearing eccentric charm.
First, the greyness. Van Rodijnen films the North Sea’s waves sparkling with the cosmic blue light of bioluminescent algae, and lit up with the disco colours of coral and plankton blooms. He also brings us cute, coo-worthy stories from the depths; take the male shorthorn sculpin fish (no looker, it must be said) who spends the winter looking after his eggs, cleaning and blowing fresh water over them. Van Rodijnen’s camera is there for the baby fish hatching – pop, pop, pop out of their pearly plump pink eggs. There are some quirky stories, too, including a barnacle with a superlong penis.
Other moments are pure spectacle. A teeming school of mackerel puts on an Olympic show of synchronised swimming, and Rodijnen’s patience as a film-maker pays off with jaw-dropping footage, literally in the case of a basking shark filmed off the coast of Scotland. Swimming with its mouth open, feeding on plankton, it’s “the big friendly giant of the seas”, says Van Rodijnen. But it can’t be a nature documentary unless there is an environmental catastrophe on the horizon. In Scotland, numbers of a puffin breeding colony are down by 30% due to overfishing. But there are eco wins, too. The Atlantic bluefin tuna, which vanished from the North Sea in the 1960s, is back, and it’s a brute – it can grow heavier than a grand piano. What the film lacks in slickness, it makes up for with enthusiasm.
• North Sea, Nature Untamed is in UK cinemas from 25 September.
