Abstract. This essay explores divergent metatextual translation strategies in the Latvian and Anglophone reception of Flow (2024), an animated feature by Latvian filmmaker Gints Zilbalodis. Our theoretical approach builds on Peeter Torop’s concept of metatextual translation, which treats interpretation as a form of cultural translation. We focus on the interplay between untranslatability and potential translatability – the idea that every act of interpretation involves both transformation and selective emphasis. This framework allows us to analyse how certain readings become dominant within specific semiotic environments and how interpretive choices reflect both strategic decisions and broader patterns of cultural communication. Our case study is grounded in a comparative close reading of selected Latvian and English-language reviews of Flow, a dialogue-free film set in a landscape submerged in water and inhabited solely by animals. The film’s aesthetic can be characterized by absences: of dialogue, of humans, of narrative explanation. This creates a space of interpretative openness. However, our analysis shows that this openness is managed differently across cultural contexts. In the Anglophone reception, Flow is widely interpreted as an allegory for environmental collapse. Critics anchor its meaning in environmental imagery and position it within the established genre of eco-cinema. This framing emerges not only from the film’s content but from the semiotic pull of global discourse around ecological crisis. Despite the director’s restraint in signalling overt messages, Anglophone critics tend to stabilise the film’s meaning through this familiar narrative, which functions as both an inter- pretive lens and a cultural coping mechanism. In contrast, Latvian critical discourse largely resists this ecological read- ing. Instead, reviewers foreground the film’s artistic language, emotional subtlety, and national animation heritage. While they acknowledge the possibility of environmental interpretation, they rarely pursue it as the primary frame. This tendency may be linked to broader discursive conditions: public concern about climate change in Latvia remains relatively low compared to European averages, and ecological narratives are less prominent in the media. Therefore, engaging with an ecological reading may be emotionally difficult, and the film’s aesthetic framing can offer interpretive relief by allowing viewers to avoid guilt, moral responsibility, or the weight of didactic meaning. In both contexts, metatextual translation serves as a means of managing the film’s affective and semantic instability, either by stabilising its meaning through recognisable narrative frames or by preserving its aesthetic openness, which allows to avoid the uncertainty related to our planet’s environmental future. While both approaches have a legitimate place within the metatextual whole, interpretive dominance can limit discursive diversity. As Peeter Torop has argued, sustaining cultural cohesion in an open world requires recognising the interplay between aesthetic, social, and ideological dimensions across local and global readings.