THE DIVE - Mark Reviews Movies

The Dive, RLJE Films

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Review by Mark Dujsik | August 24, 2023

A lot of movies about survival in a remote location seem compelled to add at least one gimmick that goes beyond some simple yet dire situation. Maybe that's a human threat of some sort, or perhaps it's a wild animal or two. As for how our stranded protagonist or protagonists will escape such a dangerous situation, it's often amazing how certain tools or other means of aid can just spring out of nowhere in such stories.

When the focus of a narrative is as restricted as a character or two who become trapped in a single location, the conveniences and contrivances of such material become amplified. We can note when and how the filmmakers cheat, either to pile on the conflict or to develop an easy way out of the corner into which the character or characters have been placed.

All of this is to say that The Dive, about a pair of sisters who encounter a life-or-death situation while scuba diving alone in a remote location, doesn't cheat. The screenplay, written by director Maximilian Erlenwein and Joachim Hedén, establishes the danger, the complications, and the possible solutions to this scenario in clear, concise, and restricted terms. Then, it sets the characters off to confront the problem at hand—and only the problem, as it's given to us at the start, at hand—with determination and resourcefulness.

It's a good example, in other words, of a survival story that's confident in its premise and admirably straightforward in its execution. It works, because the situation is terrifying, the course of the story is completely believable, and the characters have to work out the problem with limited resources, a bit of cleverness, and a good amount of understandable failure.

Those sisters are Drew (Sophie Lowe) and May (Louisa Krause), who don't get to see each other often, on account of their lives taking different paths. May has more or less estranged herself from her family for reasons that she refuses to say, especially in front of her sister. That's because Drew is still close to the siblings' mother, living with her after a long-term relationship ended (May isn't aware of either development, letting us know she's not keen to keep up with or offered such information about her family), and holds their dead or absent father in some regard (It's unclear but also unnecessary to know his current status, because the only thing that matters is what he has done in the past).

Even with the physical and emotional distance between them, the two sister make a point of taking an annual trip together. This year, they're diving off some unnamed but uninhabited coast. Both women are trained and experienced divers, but May is the more skilled of the two when it comes to scuba. She also kind of resents the activity and is envious that Drew still gets nervously excited before a dive. May was like that once, too, but now it's routine and, as the story later reveals, not the most pleasant thing for her to do.

There's not much setup for these characters, but there doesn't need to be much, either. We watch the tenuous bond between them, observe as they make a dive to explore various trenches and a cave, and are as surprised as they are when the water begins filling with falling rocks.

A rockslide has occurred on the cliffs above the shoreline, and in the chaos, Drew loses track of May. As dusty debris floats up from the sea floor, Drew realizes that her older sister was caught among the largest of the rocks, and sure enough, she finds May about 100 feet down, with her legs pinned beneath two sizeable, heavy rocks.

That's it in terms of the problem. There are no sharks or evil people or anything else added into this conflict. It's simply a race against time, since May's air tank is emptying into her lungs quickly, and a battle against what being submerged underwater for a lengthy period of time can do to the human body. Drew has to ascend, call for help, retrieve the spare tanks by the shore and in the car, and find the jack in the car's trunk.

May communicates all of this calmly and rationally, because, in theory, she's the one better suited for accomplishing this string of tasks without letting the pressure get to her. That's one of the smart abridgements of this screenplay—in how the early scenes of the sisters talking, preparing to dive, and actually swimming through the water give us all the details we need about their experience and distinct personalities. The tension here isn't just that May is trapped. It's also in the fact that Drew might become overwhelmed by the sheer stress of the situation, all of the things she has to do, and the multiple ways it could go wrong.

The specifics of what does go wrong for Drew are best left to be discovered, but Erlenwein and Hedén ensure that all of them are established from the start and that the additional complications emerge from the previous ones. There's a terrible logic, for example, for the other consequences of the rockslide, just as it makes complete sense when Drew makes a mistake or has to make split-second decision about which task is more important at the moment—eventually putting her own health in jeopardy in order to race for possible salvation.

While all of that is happening, the trapped May has her own internal crisis with which to deal, and while the idea is sound, it's not nearly as compelling or clear as the stakes of the rescue attempt. Even so, The Dive is quite the engaging, considered, and believable survival tale.

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