Metacritic reviews

White brings an incredible freshness to the well-trodden postapocalyptic genre. Starfish flips from introspective drama to Lovecraftian creature feature to pastel-tinged animation without ever losing coherence.

Pain either destroys us or makes us stronger. The trick is knowing how to avoid the traps and use it for inspiration. While he could have stayed stuck in the black void of sorrow, White instead made something beautiful. Honestly, he could not have paid a better tribute to his friend.

The work of a filmmaker I'm very excited to see and hear more from, “Starfish” is very much its own sci-fi mixtape—curated with hit and miss offerings, but with an undeniable and meaningful sincerity all the same.

It’s a little like a post-apocalyptic survivalist thriller, crossed with Lynn Ramsay’s impressionistic masterpiece “Morvern Callar,” crossed with a Radiohead video. Not all of those pieces fit together. But they combine into something strikingly original.

If White’s wild formal experimentation and narrative cul-de-sacs result in a strange identity crisis for the film — a sense that he wasn’t entirely sure which movie he wanted to make — Gardner’s stellar work unifies it.

As Starfish becomes a more obvious personal metaphor involving betrayal and forgiveness, it also becomes a bit less interesting—even as it still marks White as an ambitious talent to watch.