Breaking Surface

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.