By Stephanie Buckley

“It’s in a life or death space — it’s like there’s a time clock ticking,” says director John Carlos Frey near the end of The Snake and the Whale. He’s not exaggerating. In this feature documentary, which hinges on the survival of an incredibly intelligent, insular pod of endangered whales, the stakes are set extremely high.

The film follows a cast of defected public servants, ecologists, conservationists, advocates, and members of Tribal nations with a shared mission: to save the southern resident killer whales from extinction. With their primary food source, Chinook salmon, depleted, the southern residents of the Pacific Northwest’s Salish Sea won’t survive much longer. So where did the salmon go? The film’s subjects explain how a set of four dams in the lower Snake River prevent salmon from traveling through the river to its outlet in the Pacific Ocean.

A tale of intrigue and government corruption follows as Frey traces how government agencies, lobbyists, and politicians have collaborated to keep the dams from being removed.

It’s easy to get swept up in Frey’s unflagging pursuit of the truth behind the dams and the southern residents’ extinction — but that’s only part of the point. One of the film’s first tasks is to impress upon the viewer just how unique southern residents are. They have lifelong familial bonds and capacity for deep emotional intelligence — perhaps deeper than that of humans.

This makes it all the more heartbreaking when we cut to archival footage from the 60s and 70s, when dozens of young southern resident whales were captured and taken to marine parks, where they would be trained to perform. At multiple points throughout The Snake and the Whale, subjects describe the whales’ screams of agony and devastation. They understood what was going on: they were being taken from their families, their homes, forever.

The emotional core of the film is Tokitae, or Toki, a southern resident whale who was taken from her family at age four and transported to the Miami Seaquarium. Toki’s companion in Miami, another southern resident named Hugo, committed suicide in 1980 — apparently a common occurrence among captive orcas — and Toki lived the rest of her life in the Seaquarium without any other orcas until her death in 2023.

Intercut with the righteous fight to get the dams removed and convince politicians to take action, Lummi tribal matriarch Raynell Morris describes her experiences traveling to Miami to meet Toki. Morris, who claims to be able to communicate with orcas, visited Toki seven times before her death, attempting to heal Toki’s spirit.

I’ve always had a hard time understanding “spiritual” people — even when something sounds great in concept, or great for someone else, I struggle to really believe, to see what they’re seeing. Toward the end of The Snake and the Whale, a group of southern residents swims inland to gather, the day before Toki would die thousands of miles away. According to orca experts and ecologists, their behavior was like nothing they’d ever seen before. The whales appeared to be grieving, coming together in “what looked like agony.” I felt an instinct to be skeptical. How could they really know that Toki was dying? How could there really be a spirit world? I chose to be amazed instead — to marvel at the whales’ incredible, human-like gestures, to embrace the feeling of not knowing, to embrace emotion. Emotion, The Snake and the Whale seems to posit, might be the only real thing.

“When we are harming one thing on the planet, ultimately, we are harming ourselves,” says whale biologist Dr. Deborah Giles in the film’s final moments. It’s difficult to be a human these days, when there are endless distractions from what’s actually real, to show up for our planet and one another. This film reminds us what we all owe each other: compassion, time, care, justice, and truth.

The Snake and the Whale asserts that the southern residents are as important, as real, as we are. After all, we’re animals too.