Breaking Surface

Going diving in the middle of winters in Norway, and in a secluded place, is not the best thing to do. Well, this is the very type of movie where the story is built to stress the viewer until the end and make them hold their breath, for that, the movie succeeds, stress free! But it stops there. Of course there are worse movies.

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.

My biggest take away from this film was the scenery and cinematography on the sisters drive to the dive site which was beautifully shot and made you wonder why they wanted to go diving in the dark rather than hiking.

I think the lack of any 'wonder' in the diving scenes did make what they were doing seem a little pointless and the younger sister, who we see taking one risk after another throughout the film, more unsympathetic.

It was very well shot and must have been a lot or work for the cast and crew to make. It had some tension but it would've been better if I'd cared a little more for the characters.

Shame for dogs in this movie too.