Breaking Surface

Survival film from Sweden. Two sisters who are reunited after a long time, go together for diving like they used to when they were kids. Only while they're at the bottom of the sea, rocks fall and the younger sister gets trapped on the bottom. The older one doesn't have her sister's experience but with her guidance she tries to do everything to save her. Constant challenges and setbacks and constant effort against time as oxygen runs out. Will they both make it out of the frozen seabed alive? A pretty good and serious overall survival film from Scandinavia, with snowy landscapes and cold seabed, quite realistic and with very good acting, suspense throughout the film and combined with its short duration does not become boring at all. Pretty good effort from the north. Recommended.

I really like survival thrillers like this one and I thought the idea was pretty interesting. The movie introduces us to two sisters and their relationship between each other and their mom. Right off the bat you get an idea how their characters work and what kind of people they seem to be.

Then the incident happens and you mostly follow Ida portrayed by Moa Gammel. She is trying her best to save her sister from drowning or is she? Because her character was so dumb that it was really annoying at times and I was just shaking my head screaming at the screen. She is the kind of character that is hard to root for and also it didn't feel like she was aware that everything she does is a play against time. I get that she is probably exhausted but she was moving so slow at times and also took time with lots of the things she does. And also this movie suffers from this rare phenomenon where everything that can go wrong does and this is something that a lot of survival thrillers do and I really dislike it because the only reason is that it drives the plot forward but most of the time the realistic aspects are left behind. There is also a scene involving a dog that many people will probably really dislike and it also didn't make sense and there was absolutely no reason for it to be in the movie. Overall it was a decent survival thriller that definitely had some flaws that could have been avoided to improve this flick. [5,8/10]

As some have reviewed it before me, the movie certainly has good elements:

• the environment is beautiful !
• the shots under & above water are really good
• acting is good

But personally for me, some elements were irritating as hell:

• the main actress plays a pretty stupid person (some could argue she's maybe inexperienced as a diver and does silly things and/ or attribute her reactions to panic). But still, it's ok to be stupid in a film - but if it starts to be irritating... it's too much
• I'm a diver and wow some pretty amazing stuff happening under water. Maybe for the non-educated viewer it looks ok, but as a diver ... it's not realistic. The amount of dives/ quick surfacing/ recompressing she's doing... don't think she'd still be walking. Freediving to 33m (in a drysuit), looking for the bottle on the bottom on one breath, ... a lot of those things are not realistic

A pity ! I think with some small finetunings this could have been a very good movie.

I made an account just for this. This movie is insultingly stupid. Tuva makes all the intelligent choices after a diving accident but is undone by the utter stupidity of her own sister. If you treat it as a slapstick comedy it's fun to watch, but as a suspense thriller it's just insulting to its viewers. The writer didn't even check with a diver to make sure it's basic assumptions about diving were correct. It also contains all kinds of unnecessary complications, plot holes, convoluted story lines it is just a mess. Need more characters characters characters otherwise the review is too short..

Initially bad decisions lead eventually to bad solutions - as the theme of any script based on creating suspense works as it is. To further on claim it pictures reality on any level among experienced professional divers is hogwash and is quite telling about the asserted "skill" and "knowledge" in the field of the writer comparing this to an actual possible scenario. Any diver - professional or amateur - shouldn't be diving at all if this is their conception of events that even could occur during any dive if thoroughly planned and implemented properly. Rather consider this as but a movie.