London’s Last Wilderness review – mudflats meets Mad Max towers on eccentric estuary voyage

Here is a voyage along the Thames estuary from film-maker Pablo Behrens: an eccentric experimental documentary, a bit indulgent and not altogether thought through, but mostly engaging. Like Iain Sinclair, JG Ballard and Rachel Lichtenstein, Behrens is drawn to the unloved stretch of water between London and the sea, where the wildness of mudflats and migrating birds is in close proximity to power stations, pylons, and abandoned industry. There are stretches where the landscape looks how you might imagine the world 20 or 30 years after the collapse of civilisation, nature doing its thing surrounded by the rusted relics of infrastructure.

The film takes us on a journey through the eyes of an unseen explorer – someone (or possibly something not from our planet) as they discover the estuary. The camera is the explorer’s gaze, and we watch as if through their helmet or goggles, with the added gimmick of location coordinates flashing up on the screen. There are also scratchy voices from a command centre. We find birds wading on oozing mudflats, burning sunrises and luminous mists that dissolve everything around them. There are cheerful redbrick housing estates, knackered fairground rides, and sunburnt teenagers splashing in the water (catching God only knows what as they gulp down the river water).

Off the coast of Whitstable in Kent at the mouth of the estuary, they discover the eerie Maunsell sea forts, built during the second world war. Like something from Mad Max, these rusted steel towers look like little oil rigs on spindly legs. On-screen captions giving the explorer’s observations feel clumsy: “Several structures made it clear to me that this region had sustained a prolonged war,” is one comment – flat-footed, not quite reaching Iain Sinclair levels of lyricism, and breaks the spell a little.