There’s a fine line between too much and not enough when it comes to crafting a propulsive thriller. Jumping right into the action can grab the viewer’s attention, but if there’s not enough context or development of the characters, there’s no reason to care about what happens. The Dive, from director Maximilian Erlenwein, errs on the side of a quick start. The film is a tight-enough thriller, efficiently moving through its plot points with one nail-biting scene after another, but some of the potential tension is sapped because the script skips over key moments of characterization that could help better define the story’s stakes.
As the film opens, we find two women, Drew (Sophie Lowe) and May (Louisa Krause), driving towards the coast for a diving expedition. There’s a hint of discordance between them, and a tangential reference to “mom” suggests that they’re sisters, but little else differentiates them. Arriving on a rocky and deserted beach, they suit up in scuba gear and enter the water, where the real story begins. They explore underwater caves, including a place where a pocket of air allows for a brief, maskless respite—file that away for later reference. Aside from these few opening minutes, we don’t see much of the principal actors without their masks, and that makes it initially difficult to tell the two apart. It’s only when the crisis hits that their character is revealed through action and their personalities begin to take shape.
The script, written by Erlenwein (and based on a 2020 Swedish film written and directed by Joachim Hedén), wisely keeps the viewer close to the divers’ perspective as everything goes wrong. When giant boulders and debris tumble into the water without warning, the chaos is sudden and terrifying. May becomes trapped under a slab of rock while Drew narrowly escapes the same fate. Here’s where the characters’ distinct personalities finally come into focus. May is level-headed and more experienced in the water, but she’s entirely dependent on her panicked sister Drew to keep her cool and figure out a way to rescue May before their oxygen runs out. This is the kind of movie that’s designed to make you hold your breath in solidarity with the characters as they struggle against their own limits.
Drew’s obstacles are unexpected and unrelenting, and Lowe excels at riding the line between freaked out and fiercely determined. Risking a life-threatening case of the bends, she surfaces as quickly as she can. A fishing boat in the distance could be their salvation, but her cries and waving arms go unnoticed. She scrambles ashore, discovers a rock slide on the beach has buried their phones and keys, and she struggles to break into the trunk of their rental car for a tire jack, with the clock ticking all the while. A minimalist score by Volker Bertelmann and Raffael Seyfried makes corkscrews of the building tension.
It’s only late in the film that we get a flashback glimpse of family trauma that has driven a wedge between the sisters. The power dynamic between them shifts more than once during the film’s swift runtime, and the outcome of their crisis is both unexpected and deftly foreshadowed. Looking past the unfocused scene-setting in the opening minutes, The Dive is a sleek, finely-tuned machine, delivering thrills and ratcheting suspense with skillful underwater photography and a pair of committed performances. When the credits roll, you might realize you’ve been holding your breath half the time, and that’s a good sign of an effective underwater thriller.
Photo courtesy of RLJE Films
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