Hatches: Looking Through Water, Reviewed

Looking Through Water directed by Roberto Sneider and produced by Eric Woods and Carla Woods. Distributed by Good Deed Entertainment and AETH Entertainment, in association with Rich Entertainment Group. Written by Zach Dean and Rowdy Herrington, and based on the book Looking Through Water by Bob Rich. Starring Michael Douglas, David Morse, Michael Stahl-David, Cameron Douglas, Ximena Romo, Walker Scobell, Liza Weil, and Tamara Tunie. Runtime 106 minutes, in theaters nationwide September 12, 2025.

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Don’t run out and see Looking Through Water in the cinema just because it’s a “fly-fishing film.” It isn’t.

If you want to see screaming reels, leaping fish, and professional anglers high-fiving each other, this isn’t what you’re looking for. Looking Through Water is a work of art that doesn’t just entertain, it draws out your emotions, makes you consider your own place in this world, and perhaps changes the way you view and act toward other human beings.

Adapted from the Bob Rich book of the same name, Looking Through Water spans three generations of family trauma and chaos caused by infidelity, greed, and dishonesty. It’s an emotional roller coaster that will be relatable to anyone who has suffered through familial strife. In other words, all of us.

It just so happens that in this film, fly fishing is the one calming balm that might fix some broken relationships. As David Morse’s character Leo points out in the film, a good blood knot can fix a broken line.

The multi-generational story tells the story of William McKay, a wealthy financier who is publicly humiliated by the betrayal of his fiancée and a hostile company takeover led by his protégé.

Academy Award winner Michael Douglas plays the elderly William McKay, and he narrates the story of a life-changing fishing trip to his grandson Kyle (Walker Scobell, The Adam Project, Percy Jackson and the Olympians).

The marrow of the story takes place in the 1980s, when a young McKay (Michael Stahl-David, Cloverfield, Narcos) agrees to join his estranged father Leo in a father/son fishing tournament in San Pedro, Belize. It’s a fishing trip that forces him to confront his relationship with his father, and it starts a cascade of implications that flow like water down to his grandson Kyle, many decades later.

Almost all the fishing scenes revolve around this multi-day saltwater fishing tournament—a contest that requires father/son teams to catch at least one of each flats species: bonefish, permit, and tarpon. Young William McKay has never fly fished a day in his life, and is woefully inadequate as a fisherman. His father Leo has been an absentee father but is a successful fishing bum. But as the film’s title indicates, every character has their own backstory and their own reasons, and nothing is ever totally transparent. Even Cole—the mysterious fishing guide played by Michael Douglas’s actual son Cameron Douglas—has motivations that don’t become clear until the film’s dramatic conclusion.

Looking Through Water is filled with fishing metaphors, and fishing philosophies successfully applied to human interactions. For instance, Leo relates the loss of a blue marlin to other losses in life. . . the loss of a fortune, of a lover, or a family member. “Losing that fish was the best thing that ever happened to me. Sometimes we lose . . . it makes us better men.”

Even when they aren’t talking about fishing, the main characters manage to explain the Bushido code of true fishermen that includes, among other things, respect and honor for your opponent (the fish), learning from failures, and never sharing secrets. As Michael Douglas’s character so eloquently states, “Son, you told me because you trusted me. I’m bound and privileged by that confidence. That’s my honor.”

While Douglas is brilliant, David Morse’s character is central to all the fly-fishing themes in the film and brings a fresh perspective to the archetype of the elderly fly-fishing curmudgeon.

Perhaps my favorite scene in the film is the romantic interlude between young McKay and Ximena Romo, where down at a moonlit beach, she teaches him to cast by standing closely behind him and moving his arm for him. It was refreshing and welcome to see a woman as the casting expert and teacher.

In the book, the fishing tournament takes place in the Florida Keys, but it’s difficult to make the current Keys scene look like 1984, so the location was moved to the fishing village of San Pedro, where not much has changed, including the fishing pangas. Local fishing guides and townspeople appear as extras in the film, so if you have previously fly fished in San Pedro, there is probably a flat, a boat, or a guide you recognize. In total, the production crew filmed 24 days in San Pedro, three days in Massachusetts, and four days in Mexico City.

Bob Rich, the author of Looking Through Water, is chairman and majority owner of Rich Products (Rich’s), a food processing company headquartered in Buffalo, New York. He is a conservationist, a philanthropist, and a major donor to organizations such as Project Healing Waters and others. In 2024 he received the Lefty Kreh Award for Lifetime Achievement in Conservation from Bonefish & Tarpon Trust (BTT). Like Lefty, Rich was one of the founders of BTT and, with Capt. Paul Dixon, started the BTT Annual NYC Dinner & Awards Ceremony, which is approaching its 14th year and accounts for about 25 percent of BTT’s annual fundraising.

Rich is a friend of Andy Mill and other tournament regulars, and knows the tournament world well, and helped create the Florida Redbone series with Gary Ellis to fight and find the cure for cystic fibrosis. His other books include Why We Fish: Stories of Friendship and Adventure (2025), Right Angle: Tales from a Sporting Life (2011), Fishing Club: Brothers and Sisters of The Angle (2006), and the autobiographical Catching Big Fish (2025). He is currently working on a documentary called Anglers of the Oval Office.

Capt. Paul Dixon, a well-known guide in Montauk, New York and Key Largo, Florida, is a longtime friend of Bob Rich and served as a technical advisor for the fishing scenes in the film. He was on location for the filming in Belize and assembled an all-star cast of advisors and fishing tournament extras, including Capt. Justin Rea, Steve Bechard, and Josef Borski. Dixon also makes a small cameo in the film, at the “shotgun start” of the fishing tournament.

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Ross Purnell is Fly Fisherman's editor and publisher.