Mark Reviews Movies: THE SWIMMERS

The Swimmers, Netflix

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Review by Mark Dujsik | November 22, 2022

The emotional highpoint of The Swimmers arrives relatively early. After it does, there's little that seems as consequential or feels nearly as impactful throughout the rest of the movie.

This story, written by director Sally El Hosaini and Jack Thorne, is based on a true one. It's set a few years into the still-ongoing Syrian Civil War and revolves around a pair of sisters who migrate from their war-torn home to Europe, hoping that the rest of their family will be able to join them by more official means. Their journey, through various human and natural and governmental obstacles, is the real heart of this tale, once the sisters have accomplished that goal, Hosaini's movie undergoes a sudden dramatic deflation of sorts.

The two sisters are Yusra and Sara Mardini, played by real-life sisters Nathalie and Manal Issa. Their family lives in a suburb of Damascus, which is facing constant attacks, although the conflict has yet to reach the young women's home when we first meet them.

They're swimmers, training under their father Ezzat (Ali Suliman), a former swimmer whose career was interrupted by military service. Of the two siblings, Yusra is the more talented, and she has dreams of making it to the 2016 Olympics in Rio de Janeiro the following year. The war that once was a somewhat distant thing, though, keeps getting closer to home.

A few of Sara's friends are killed in rocket and bombing attacks. The family is forced out of their home. A swimming competition comes to a sudden end when mortars reach the facility, and a there's stomach-churning moment, regardless of whether it's based on a real event or imagined by the filmmakers to make the point apparent, when one of those explosives lands in the water directly in her path.

Obviously, the family needs to do something to escape this conflict, and after learning that Germany is providing safe passage for the families of refugees under the age of 18, 17-year-old Yusra and the older Sara decide to flee their home, make their way to Europe, and arrange a reunion there with their father, mother (played by Kinda Alloush), and younger sister. Yusra dreams of swimming in that international competition and Sara's uncertainty about what she wants to do with her own life are put on hold for the moment.

What follows this rudimentary but clear-eyed setup of the war, as well as the impact upon this one family, is a lengthy and harrowing section, following the sisters, as well as a cousin named Nizar (Ahmed Malek), as they travel from Turkey, to Greece, and, finally, to Germany. Along the way, the group has to deal with multiple smugglers, some of whom might be genuine in their efforts and others who are simply taking advantage of desperate people, and barriers as tricky as political sentiment or as literal as a fence covered in razor wire. The three meet some fellow refugees and make some bonds, and there's a genuine of how these connections are immediately strong, under such helpless circumstances, and either fleeting or tenuous, since everyone has a different destination in mind and any of them could be separated, detained, or even killed at any moment.

The climactic moment here arrives as the trio and a group of other refugees are crammed into a shabby, inflatable raft with an undependable motor, shoved off into the sea on their own to make it from Turkey to one of the Greek islands. Somewhere in between the two countries, the raft begins filling with water and the engine stalls. Sara and then Yusra make a decision that puts their own lives at great risk, simply because these people need help and they might be only the two with the skills required to accomplish the task. The way Hosaini depicts the conditions of this potentially deadly voyage, the hopeless of realizing that no aid is coming, and the almost reflexive selflessness of the two young women leads to a sequence of such overwhelming admiration of the story's subjects that there's little more to say about it.

Unfortunately, the rest of this story, which tries to make something more generically and easily inspirational out of these circumstances, never reaches the dramatic or emotional heights of that moment on the boat. With a bit more security in their situation, the two sisters begin going their separate ways. Yusra makes it her mission to train for the Olympics, under the tutelage and support of German coach Sven (Matthias Schweighöfer), and, now with at least some freedom to decide whether or not she wants to swim, Sara begins to look for some way to give her own life meaning.

The elder sister fades into the background, as Yusra figures into a couple of training montages and the uncertain question if she'll have a team for which to compete in the upcoming Olympics. As a result, the framing of this tale as something so straightforward, after the movie goes to such lengths to show how complex and filled with uncertainty the refugee experience can be, and so narrowly focused on a single goal is underwhelming and a bit disingenuous. The Swimmers tells a story clearly worth telling beyond these two characters, but in terms of the actual story of these two sisters, the movie overshadows the genuinely inspirational part with an unfortunately formulaic third act.

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