At sea, no one can hear you scream.
That could’ve been a rather accurate slogan for Acadian director Rodrigue Jean’s new film, Labrador – Autopsy of Silence, which premiered at this year’s Tribeca Festival, winning an award for the best international narrative feature, best cinematography, and best performance by Christopher Angatookalook.
Angatookalook plays Alupa Tulugak, a young Inuk mechanic, whom we first see in a flash-forward scene where the police arrive at his doorstep to take him in for interrogation. As the story turns the clock back, we find Alupa aboard a cargo freighter, where he is reunited with his lover, the ship’s cook, Alex (Alexandre Landry).
The latter is pressured into a sexual relationship with the First Officer, Michelle (Gabrielle Poulin B.), which creates unexpressed, but tangible tension. When Alex is found dead one morning, an investigation commences, but none of the main players seems to be willing to speak up about what had or might have happened.
Labrador brings another major festival hit of recent years to mind -- Justine Triet’s Anatomy of a Fall. Both films have a death at the center of their plots, and both flirt with the thriller/ mystery genre (and a bit of a courtroom drama in the second half). At the same time, neither film really commits to those genres, aiming for something different instead.
In Triet’s film, it was an examination of the illusiveness of truth, as well as a dissection of a disintegrating marriage. Labrador also has a relationship at the heart of it all: it's a story of love that is forced to end due to external means, but by no means does it fizzle out immediately.
We don’t stop loving someone just because the person is dead, and so, Alex doesn’t really leave Alupa’s side once he meets his unfortunate fate. Since the film unfolds its story in a non-chronological way, Alex’s presence becomes a constant, whether we view him as a voice inside the protagonist’s head or a manifestation of his grief, a process he must go through. Unlike the invasive procedure mentioned in the film’s title and at one point performed on screen, this is a work that weaves its story delicately, filling it not with details and factoids, but with omissions, mixed messages, and yes, notable silence.
Silence becomes one of the film’s most crucial aesthetic tools, as it isn’t merely something that is kept to possibly conceal the truth. It's a vault to hold together all of the things that simply cannot be put into words. Just like with the sea or the vast landscapes of ice and snow, captured in a mesmerizing way by Mathieu Laverdière’s camera, there is always a sense of something bigger and more complex behind Alupa’s reserved presence.
Just like there are noticeable undercurrents in the story itself, with the topics of race, class, and social injustice towards “the other”, all woven intricately into it. Still, staying true to its title, the film never raises its voice and refuses to draw definitive conclusions, even after it delivers the answer to its supposedly central mystery.
In truth, in a different way than Anatomy of a Fall, but Labrador also only reveals so much, while spinning its meditative tale of death and love, of which the latter strangely manages to prevail.
The film enjoyed its world premiere at the 2026 Tribeca Festival. Visit the film's page at the official festival site for more information.