NR | 1h 18m | Adventure, Drama, Thriller | 2020
Disaster movies wreck cities, sink ships, and make entire populations wish they’d stayed home. Digital effects, including better cameras, editing software, and affordable visual effects, have made it possible to build convincing disasters around smaller stories, fewer characters, and limited locations, while still giving audiences a thrill.
This has created the contained survival film, a close relative of the traditional disaster flick. Instead of following churning crowds of people sprinting through collapsing buildings or flooded streets, these productions can focus on only a handful of people (or sometimes just one) trying to reach the end credits in one piece. The danger stays localized.
The disaster in director Joachim Heden’s “Breaking Surface” comes from a sudden rockslide during a winter dive off the coast of northern Norway, and the film soon settles into a survival drama centered on two half-sisters. One is pinned underwater. The other tries to deal with a growing list of problems before her air runs out.
Cold Dark Ocean
A childhood diving accident still follows Ida (Moa Gammel). She travels to northern Norway to spend the holidays with Tuva (Madeleine Martin), her younger half-sister, and Anne (Trine Wiggen), their mother. The planned family dive drops to two people after Anne becomes ill.Tuva works as a professional diver and approaches the icy waters like another day at the office. Ida enters with less experience, old fears, and plenty of not-so-good stuff happening back home.
Their destination is a secluded fjord surrounded by copious amounts of snow and rock—beautiful in the way places often are. Then something goes wrong, and there’s nobody around to hear about it.
The sisters have a relatively peaceful dive at first, even emitting some goofy noises at a pair of visiting “peaceful” orcas. As they’re just preparing to surface, a large falling rock crashes into the water, strikes Tuva, and pins her on the seafloor.
Ida swims back up to call for help and learns that the collapse has sealed away all their gear. With no signal or passing traffic and very little time to waste, Ida begins making repeated dives in and out of the freezing water while searching for extra oxygen.
Cold Water, Old Wounds
Heden keeps the film close to the sisters and the practical misery concerning the rescue. The water is freezing, the equipment is limited, and every trip below the surface drains Ida. He gives the audience enough time to understand each problem before another one arrives, creating a brisk 78-minute ordeal.Gammel plays Ida as frightened, stubborn, and increasingly frustrated as every piece of equipment seems to fail when she needs it the most. Her panic feels connected to the childhood accident that has followed her into adulthood, so even her bad calls make sense in the moment.
Tuva spends much of the film pinned beneath the rock, although Martin keeps her active in the rescue. Using their linked comms, Tuva talks Ida through the emergency and guides her from the seafloor.
As a side note, my idea of surviving cold weather usually involves piling on several blankets and aggressively turning up the thermostat. All of this swimming around in freezing waters definitely took me out of my comfort zone, as I’m sure it will others.
“Breaking Surface” closes on a humane note after all the panic and family friction. It’s less about keeping score and more about supporting each other when it counts.
Family can be exhausting sometimes, especially when old resentments refuse to stay buried. However, as this film shows, loyalty has a way of surfacing when it counts the most.
