This survival thriller puts an underwater twist on 127 Hours, the Danny Boyle movie in which James Franco’s arm gets wedged in a boulder while he’s out hiking. Here, the limb-stuck-in-rock predicament is 30-odd meters below sea level, with an American diver who traps her leg off the coast of Malta. (Plot spoiler: no DIY surgery is involved.) What follows is a race against the clock, cleverly constructed by director Maximilian Erlenwein and co-writer Joachim Hedén. Their script throws in plenty of calamities to nobble the diver’s escape, but didn’t quite manage – for me at least – to spark a vertiginous clammy terror.
Sophie Lowe and Louisa Krause play sisters Drew and May, driving out to dive in a hire car. Clearly, there’s unspoken conflict between the two. May (Krause) doesn’t know that Drew (Lowe) has been made redundant from her journalism job; they only meet once a year to dive. But it’s older sister May – tough, resourceful, calm – whose leg gets pinned by a boulder when cliff erosion sends great hulks of rock pelting into the sea. She only has 22 minutes of air left.
May sends her younger sister – sunny-natured, though worryingly flaky – to the surface to get one of the spare tanks. For the rest of the movie, Drew swims up and down trying to save her sis. Underwater, visibility is poor, so it’s the soundtrack, the unearthly bassy booms of the sea, that creates the atmosphere. On the surface, there are some nail-biting scenes, particularly when Drew has two minutes to get the spare scuba tank down to May but spots a boat nearby. Should she waste precious seconds flagging it down? There are moments like this that are pumped up on cinematic adrenaline, but a faffy backstory drains the tension.
• The Dive is released on 25 August in UK and Irish cinemas, and in Australian cinemas on 19 October.
