A death-defying ordeal in an impossible situation has been the inspiration for many true-life dramas, often to startlingly good effect. There’s a pleasure in watching people act competently and cleverly to help one another, and inspiration to be taken from their example. Sadly, this feature adaptation of director Alex Parkinson’s own 2019 documentary of the same name is so faithful that it undercuts its own drama.
There should be real drama here, too: the 2012 incident that inspired this film is horrific. Chris (Finn Cole), Dave (Simu Liu) and Duncan (Woody Harrelson) are deep-sea divers who specialise in tending and repairing oil pipelines. They spend a month at a time in a pressurised tank to work on the bed of the North Sea, a terrifying prospect even before bad weather and computer failure cause the ship to which they’re tethered to drift, resulting in Chris being left on the ocean floor with only minutes of air in his tank.
Key moments are underplayed to the point of disappearing altogether.
There's no villain here beyond the weather, and part of Parkinson’s point is that everyone involved is simply a decent person doing their best: there’s no singular hero, no stick-in-the-mud troublemaker. But the determination to avoid artificial drama also proves a fatal limitation. Key moments are underplayed to the point of disappearing altogether, and everyone in the ship’s wheelhouse is so monosyllabic that there’s little sense of fear for their colleague – at least beyond Mark Bonnar’s dive captain Craig, whose shaking hands at one point communicate his worry for the castaway. At one point Dave and Duncan are just left in a diving bell for half an act, not obviously contributing; a better film would at least have shown their state of mind.
Obviously, all this stoicism and reserve are worthy qualities, deserving of celebration, and clearly all of these people did a good job in horrendous conditions. But for the landlubbers watching, it might be helpful to have the stakes laid out a little more clearly, the emotions enunciated a bit and perhaps a little more philosophy alongside the silence – even if everyone really was this tight-lipped in real life. Fundamentally, making a drama demands more drama than a documentary, and it doesn’t feel like this story has justified the leap.