Rock pools don't seem like paradoxical places at first glance. They seem to be swinging through the same gravitational fields as they did tens of thousands of years ago. That's perhaps why we choose to go to them with a longing for peace at confusing times, when our own tides have been beaten down and turned. But they are filled with a paradoxical quality: a sense of reliable unreliability. A sense of rhythmic change.

When I spoke to Adam Radage, cinematographer and producer of the short film Rock Pool, he described these habitats as among the most extreme environments in the world. Over remarkably short periods, temperature, salinity, and oxygen can fluctuate dramatically. Rocks are moved. Water evaporates. The sun heats shallow pools. Then the tide arrives, and suddenly the little body of water that seemed sealed off is part of the circulation once more. The creatures living here have evolved not around serenity and calm but between daily loss and daily requisition.

The short film Rock Pool is about those multiple layers between the tides. The rich and troubled world of rock pools. We enter a jungly, slithery shore; a primordial landscape of kelp forests battling one another, half-buried anemones, of translucent bodies, of disturbingly bright tentacles. There are no boundaries here between the human, the animal and the planetary. Rock pools are held in place by the interaction of them: like one big connective tissue.

Rock Pool doesn't speak to the conventions through which we have learned to watch animals. There is no hunt, no chase, no teeth, or claw. No blood being shed, and dynasties being disturbed. There is no lover, no horror, and no anguish of being alive. There are no fast-forwarded Shakespearean tragedies. There is no translation of this crab-eats-crab world. Rock Pool is confusing and effortlessly rewarding. It invites those who have the nerve to look beyond their own reflection on the water.

I hear from Adam Radage that a strange bargain takes place in the rock pools. Only if you become patient enough will the mystery and surprise waiting an inch beneath your nose find you. No need for binoculars or skill training; if you go with a willingness to bury yourself in the barnacle-encrusted rocks, in the bruised and battered shoreline, in the cold water reaching your ankles, all kinds of resilient and defended creatures will say hello. The closer we look at rock pools, the more they remain unknown. The actuality of things is limitless, and we can simply take a glimpse into a fragment of the universe that melts and dissolves twice a day, only to reappear stranger.