The complex relationship between scuba diving sisters is explored in indie thriller, The Dive, although experienced divers may have to suspend a fair bit of disbelief to enjoy it
I do not, as a general rule of thumb, watch anything on TV or film that is related to diving. I lived underwater for the better part of ten years and as a result, any mention of ‘oxygen tanks’, ‘goggles’ and ‘flippers’, or the implication that scuba divers teeter on the edge of death every time they look at the water, sets my teeth on edge.
The Dive, on the other hand, intrigued me. An indie film directed by Maximilian Erlenwein (Skylines), with a cast of just two and a production team half the size of a blockbuster movie’s catering department, seemed like the sort of movie to focus more on storytelling than the poorly-written guff that has plagued Hollywood in recent years.
We are introduced directly to the two leads, May and Drew, two sisters played by Louisa Krause (Billions) and Sophie Lowe (Medieval), who are travelling to a remote diving destination for an annual scuba diving adventure. May clearly does not wish to be there and Drew is altogether too excited – not even five minutes in, and the perfect storm for a diving disaster is brewing.
While never explicitly mentioned, the destination will be familiar to many divers as Malta, with a long descent down steps carved into the cliff to the dive site’s entry point. May, despite her lack of enthusiasm, is the more cautious of the two, bringing spare tanks and a telephone, while Drew appears to be more interested in getting into the water than performing safety checks.
Wearing full-face masks because it would otherwise be a silent movie, the girls are a few minutes into their dive – the taciturn May apparently swimming along in her own little world while Drew barrel-rolls through the water – when catastrophe strikes in the form of a sudden rockfall, and May is trapped down at 30 metres.
Drew is faced with the choice of saving herself or putting her own life at risk to save her sister…
Experienced divers, by this point, will have plenty of bones to pick with a variety of plot devices and several quite fundamental diving errors. However, there are licences that need to be granted in favour of the story that unfolds. Ask anybody who has served in the military to comment on a war movie and I promise you they will find more bones to pick than a dead whale, and I once had a physicist friend who genuinely mocked Star Wars because ‘laser beams wouldn’t go pewpewpew in the vacuum of space…’
The errors are – mostly – minor, but what makes the movie is the performance of the two leads. As somebody who has an inkling of what happens to the human psyche when things go wrong underwater, I thought the two women – who apparently had no diving experience prior to making the movie – were outstanding.
Louisa Krause’s stoic demeanour as the trapped diver, trying to calm her panicking sister, genuinely made me believe – apart from a couple of scripting errors – that she was an experienced diver; but it was Sophie Lowe’s performance that made the whole movie for me, and I really became invested in the denouement of her rescue attempt in what must have been a physically and emotionally demanding role, unadvised though some of the character’s actions may have been.
The Dive is clearly an allegorical story of the complex relationship between the two sisters, and it was here I thought the movie fell short. We don’t really know why May is so unhappy; we know very little about why their relationship is strained; and recurring flashbacks to times when the two younger girls were swimming with their father do not clearly answer what influence he may have had on their lives.
However, it is beautifully shot, brilliantly acted, and much of the action is filmed underwater (although probably not at 30m). It may not have been completely accurate in terms of scuba diving technicalities, but I was genuinely moved by the unfolding drama.
The Dive will be released in UK cinemas on 25 August
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