River, review: dreary enough to put you off nature documentaries – and rivers – for life

Remember 2015 BBC crime drama River? Vastly underrated, it starred Stellan Skarsgård as DI River, who was haunted by the ghost of his recently murdered colleague (Nicola Walker). It worked perfectly as a self-contained story, yet I always hoped it would be recommissioned.

When I saw a programme with the same title in the BBC listings, my heart leapt. Annoyingly, it was a namesake. River (BBC Four) was a documentary about waterways instead. To rub salt into the wound, it was a terminally dull one.

Narrated by Willem Dafoe, this Australian production opened with a WH Auden quote and superfluous making-of footage in arty black-and-white. Things only grew more self-important from there. It was visually spectacular but took itself as seriously as a sensitive sixth-former’s poetry.

A sequel to 2017’s Mountain, this 75-minute film had lofty cinematic aspirations. I soon tired of swooping aerial drone shots and time-lapse photography. It was filmed in 39 locations but never identified which rivers we were looking at. Dafoe’s script was so portentous and pretentious, I found myself arguing with it aloud – which at least kept me from nodding off.

“Rivers are the source of human dreams.” Are they? “We once worshipped rivers as gods.” Did we really? “The world’s great cities all have a river at their heart.” What about Madrid or Milan? “Rivers run into the future and remember the past.” Oh hush, you frightful bore.

While an intrusive score by the Australian Chamber Orchestra swelled, it was like having a pompous geography graduate chuntering in your ear during a classical recital. As seems compulsory for nature documentaries nowadays, the home stretch became a finger-wagging lecture about plastic waste and climate change. Just when things couldn’t get more miserable, Radiohead turned up on the soundtrack.

This wasn’t meditative enough to qualify as “Slow TV”, partly because neither Dafoe nor the musicians would pipe down. By the time the credits rolled on River, I wanted to throw myself into the nearest one.