It stars Marie-Josée Croze as a depressed young businesswoman who becomes romantically involved with the son of a man she killed in a hit-and-run accident.

It won five Genie Awards, including Best Motion Picture, and the FIPRESCI Prize at the 51st Berlin International Film Festival.

One night, while driving, Bibiane accidentally hits a 53-year-old Norwegian Canadian fishmonger, Annstein Karson, and subsequently flees the scene.

He encounters Bibiane by chance, and she poses as his late father's neighbour, helping Evian sort through Annstein's possessions.

[4] He began making notes on the story in spring 1998, while finishing his film August 32nd on Earth, but set it aside as "too difficult", given its detached heroine.

[6] He began pitching the screenplay, and later said some readers told him it gave them nightmares, and that it was "too dark and heavy", though Villeneuve regarded it as nearly comedic.

[4] He had also contemplated the alternative of a talking dog, based on a puppy his family had recently adopted, but preferred the metaphor of "a fish out of water".

Villeneuve sought "someone with a very specific energy" for the lead, and during casting met novice actress Marie-Josée Croze for the first time.

[6] The fish narrator was portrayed via animatronics; while inspired by a trout, the model was designed to resemble a prehistoric species "with big black eyes and a sad, gaping mouth".

The website's critical consensus states: "A peculiar breach of morality that leads with pretension: Denis Villeneuve guides Maelstrom through teetering absurdity without malicious intent".

[16] Voir critic Éric Fourlanty positively reviewed the photography and direction, comparing it to a dream, but found the writing lacking in places.

[19] Vincent Ostria wrote in Les Inrockuptibles that the production initially disappointed, but it featured whimsy and an ironic use of music, and Villeneuve was among the better Canadian directors behind Atom Egoyan.

[20] Stephen Holden assessed it as "a meditation on the disconnection between the glossy surfaces of high-end urban existence and the life-and-death realities they camouflage", with Dadaist elements.

[21] In The Los Angeles Times, Kevin Thomas hailed it as a "stylish, breathless film, very much the dynamic work of a young man [Villeneuve] of talent, passion and brashness".

[30] Producer Roger Frappier and Croze, hoping to secure an Academy Award nomination, also unsuccessfully campaigned for a Golden Globe Award for Best Foreign Language Film nomination, screening the film for 60 members of the Hollywood Foreign Press Association in Los Angeles in winter 2000.