The Dive movie review: don’t hold your breath

It’s 47 Meters Down all over again. Or maybe Breaking Surface, the 2020 Norwegian film this is based on, was 47 Meters Down all over again (I haven’t seen it). Either way, if you’re gonna do the same thing all over again, you’d better give us a reason to watch your movie and not the other ones. But the best that can be said about The Dive, the first English-language film from German filmmaker Maximilian Erlenwein, is that it is almost exactly as successful as 47 Meters Down… which is to say, not very. Intermittent moments of fleeting suspense do not a wholly satisfying thriller make.

Sisters Drew (Sophie Lowe: Blow the Man Down) and May (Louisa Krause: Dark Waters, Jane Wants a Boyfriend) are scuba-diving off an unnamed remote, deserted beach — the film was shot in Malta — hoping to see some underwater caves, and most of the tension Erlenwein is able to whip up comes here, right in the beginning. As they flip and flap through tight rock formations, I, well, held my breath waiting for something to collapse upon them, and cringed at the risks they’re courting. But this is cinematic diversion: the real danger comes from way above, when the cliffs on the beach landslide into the water, partially trapping May under huge boulders. She’s okay, but she’s stuck, and running out of air. Now Drew must swim back to the surface, call for help, and return with their extra oxygen tanks to give them time to await rescue.

Of course Drew encounters obstacles: all their stuff, including car keys and cell phones, has been buried in the landslide. But the initial cleverness in how and why Drew’s efforts are thwarted quickly gives way to preposterousness; absolutely everything that can go wrong for Drew does, eliciting reactions from her that feel less like her flailing around in a panic and more like the script doing so as it realizes it doesn’t have enough plot to stretch itself out to feature length.

And even then, more padding is still required. While she waits for help, May has flashbacks to traumatic childhood memories that may indicate why the sisters seem rather estranged; they’ve clearly been out of touch for a while to the point where May didn’t even know where Drew is living. Or maybe some more recent upset is behind their rift? Erlenwein’s script fumbles the women’s relationship like he does most of the underwater stuff: it’s too often murky to the point where I gave up trying to figure out what was going on, and stopped caring. (I never much started.) Same too with the pseudo philosophizing about facing death that never quite settles on what it wants to say.

Eventually, watching oxygen gauges run down was less gripping than glancing at my own watch, which I kept tsking at until The Dive came to its anticlimactic ending. Where it just stopped.

more films like this:
• 127 Hours [Prime US | Prime UK | Apple TV | Disney+ UK]
• Fall [Prime US | Prime UK | Apple TV | Netflix UK]