The documentary The Deepest Breath (now on Netflix) is immediately upfront about the way director Laura McGann assembled this story about world-record-setting Italian freediver Alessia Zecchini and Irish safety diver Stephan Keenan – opening title cards reveal that the film consists of footage shot by divers, with archival footage and “reconstruction” mixed in. That’s true for most documentaries, but it’s a bit different in this case, since McGann structures the story like a suspenseful dramatic thriller, assuming her audience doesn’t know how it ends. So a word of advice: Don’t look up those names before you watch this gripping and poetic film.
The Gist: We meet Alessia in the Bahamas, where she’ll participate in a competitive freediving event, where highly specialized athletes will hold their breath for several minutes to see who can dive the deepest. It’s obviously a dangerous sport, but Alessia says she doesn’t think about death. Next we see her covered head-to-toe in a skintight diving suit, gulping air and then going down, down, down into the ocean, hand-over-hand on a rope until the water pressure is intense enough that she can just let go and freefall the rest of the way down. How deep? We’re not sure at first, but we’ll eventually learn that her hero, Natalia Molchanova, set the world record at 101 meters. The bright blue water turns dark blue, and then black, the darkness intensifying the already arduous psychology of such an extreme physical endeavor. Alessia reaches the measured depth, snatches a card off the anchor to prove she reached it, then begins the difficult ascent, the pressure making it like swimming against a current, albeit with a depleted oxygen supply.
And Alessia doesn’t quite make it. A few meters shy of the surface, her body goes limp. Safety divers hovering nearby make sure her mouth is closed as they push her to the surface. Her face is a portrait of terror: eyes wide as if she’s staring into an incomprehensible eternity. One of the divers steadies her body as another breathes into her mouth to save her life. One of those safety divers was Stephen Keenan, characterized here as a restless soul who, inspired by David Attenborough documentaries he saw as a kid, and traumatized by his mother’s death after a long bout with cancer, traveled across Africa to see gorillas in the wild, and learned to scuba dive so he could indulge his fascination with the sea. He learned to freedive, and eventually settled in Dahab, Egypt, a freediving mecca thanks to the presence of a “blue hole,” a cavern of plummeting depths nestled amid a reef, with a gorgeous natural arch beneath the water. Nearby, a series of placards on a rocky outcropping mark the memories of divers who died trying to swim through the arch. There are dozens.
The film cuts between Stephen and Alessia’s personal stories. As a teenager, Alessia showed a preternatural ability to freedive, which one of her eventual competitors and friends describes as a “supernatural power.” It didn’t take long for her to work her way into serious competition. We learn that blackouts, like we saw happen to Alessia earlier, are one of the hazards of the sport, especially one where competitors push themselves to their limits in a quest for world records. If safety divers don’t react quickly, the freediver could suffer brain damage, or worse. Stephen’s brush with death during a blackout turned him away from competition, so he opened a freediving school in Dahab; he became a safety diver, and one of some renown after he risked his own life to save that of Molchanova’s son after he blacked out at a terrifying 40 meters beneath the surface.
Meanwhile, the freediving world was rocked by awful news: Molchanova, during a 2015 freedive off the Spanish coast, disappeared into the water and was never seen again. It’s a tragic backdrop to Stephen and Alessia’s stories, which would intersect in 2017 at Vertical Blue, a competition in the Bahamas that’s described as “the Wimbledon of freediving.” Her goal was to beat Molchanova’s 101-meter record, but she was way off her game, experiencing multiple blackouts. Stephen could pinpoint what she was doing wrong, so he started training her, and proximity bred romance – and inspiration. She refocused, and set her sights on the record.
What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Netflix could have its own freediving category: No Limit is a fictional (and sexy!) story of a freediver who falls in love with her abusive coach. The Home Game doc series features an episode about freediving. Hold Your Breath: The Ice Dive is a short doc about an attempt to beat the world record for freediving beneath ice. The Oscar-winning doc My Octopus Teacher follows a freediver as he regularly observes a cephalopod pal as a form of therapy. But the grandaddy of all the freediving docs, movies, and series has to be director Luc Besson’s 1988 movie The Big Blue, a visual marvel and a stunning achievement in BOATS (Based On A True Story) cinema.
Performance Worth Watching: Alessia’s achievements are profound, and mesmerizing to experience, even secondhand via your TV. But the cinematographers who capture her harrowing adventures into the hoary deeps? That they capture the images so competently and poetically is just as remarkable.
Memorable Dialogue: Underwater photographer Kristina Vackova puts the situation into harsh perspective: “It is always the ocean. And we are nothing.”
Sex and Skin: None.
Our Take: You’ll notice from the start that The Deepest Breath has an understated, almost melancholy tone, and that Stephen and Alessia are conspicuously absent among the interviewees, who consist of friends and family speaking in the past tense. That’s a subtle tip of the hand that this story is a tragedy – and that McGann is manipulating the narrative (and us, by extension) for greater dramatic effect. That’s not a knock on the filmmaker; she successfully sustains tension and suspense, keeps us riveted to the screen and avoids many of the formulaic elements of documentary filmmaking.
It certainly helps that Stephen, and to a lesser degree Alessia, frequently documented their adventures on video and in social media, thus allowing McGann to diversify her visual presentation of the story. (Events like Vertical Blue are also extensively chronicled, and we get to spend time with Alessia’s incredibly worried father as he watches a livestream of her world record attempt.) And that allows her to focus on the breathtaking imagery that is the soul of The Deepest Breath; the film details how freediving differs greatly from other sports in the sense that it’s meditative, and requires athletes to reach a psychological zen-like state in order to not be overwhelmed by the great and mighty loneliness of descending into vast darkness. It’s far outside the adrenalized nature of other extreme sports.
What the film doesn’t give us is the ins and outs of the sport – any questions you may have about the rigors of training, the physical toll on freedivers’ bodies and how these world champions make a living will go unanswered. McGann takes a more intuitive, ecstatically truthful tack to the subject matter, pushing Stephen and Alessia’s emotional journeys to the forefront. She interviews their respective fathers for deeper insight into their character, and while a narrative of trauma defines Stephen’s, Alessia’s is focused more intently on her sporting achievements. I don’t think we ever truly learn what drives Alessia’s competitive spirit, or what makes her tick; she doesn’t seem to have a dark-side death wish, but the film is ultimately too tentative to dig deeper. McGann instead relies on the overwhelmingly fearsome and gorgeous imagery to imply deeper contemplations. Even the most amazing – dare I say breathtaking? – human achievements are nothing compared to the existential force of nature.
Our Call: The Deepest Breath isn’t a (sorry) deep dive into the details of a niche sport, but its awe-inspiring cinematography leaves an indelible impression. STREAM IT.
John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.
