Leviathan begins in medias res, on the deck of a fishing trawler that’s ploughing through a dark, unnamed ocean at the first light of dawn. Clad in primary-coloured rubbers, the crew are heaving away, hauling in a load. Who are these men? How long have they been out at sea? What exactly are they doing and how exactly are they going about it?

This film happens to be a documentary but it is the polar opposite of a dry information-dump: wave-lashed from beginning to end, the lens often bejewelled with beads of seawater, Leviathan isn’t ‘dry’ in any sense of the word.

There is no explanatory narration, and the only music is diegetic, snatches of heavy metal whose double-bass roll seems the most appropriate soundtrack to the mission at hand. The closing credits will finally state that we’ve been off the coast of New Bedford, Massachusetts – in the waters where Melville’s Pequod gave chase to Moby Dick. As for the rest, we’re left to find out for ourselves, to get our own sea legs.

Leviathan chooses an immersive – or rather submersive – approach. It’s as though we’ve been handed a pair of waders, thrust out onto the rocking and rolling deck and told to get to work ourselves.

The film is at once bruisingly physical and seemingly weightless. This weightlessness is attributable to Castaing-Taylor and Paravel’s use of the GoPro camera, a rough-and-ready waterproof model which first gained popularity with surfers and extreme sportsmen for its lightweight durability.

At times, the GoPro is used to penetrate and probe, elevating the smallest of incidences into something mythic. Elsewhere, the imagery is simply, bluntly majestic. Castaing-Taylor and Paravel allowed the camera free range of motion on all sides of the ship, to skiff back and forth between water and sky, both teeming with life. Those black flocks with their clapping wings! Wow, the sea is full of starfish! The idea is not to show you a way of life, but to show you how that way of life might feel.

The film is a vertigo-inducing study of the human relationship to the sea and a cosmic portrait of mankind’s place at the edge of wilderness. Leviathan is ethnographic – Véréna Paravel and Lucien Castaing-Taylor are filmmakers, artists and anthropologists working at the Sensory Ethnography Lab at Harvard University – but above all, this is stunning cinema, and proof that there are more things in the sky and sea than you can imagine, that there are new images waiting to be discovered.

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