Review of the thriller “Underwater Trap” by Maximilian Erlenwein

The thriller The Dive by German director Maximilian Erlenwein is released. According to Julia Shagelman, this story of sister divers rescuing each other in the depths is as squeezed by genre conventions as one of its heroines is by a boulder crushing her.

Claustrophobic survival thrillers are a well-deserved genre, loved by viewers and filmmakers alike because, with a relative minimum of funds, they allow you to experience the maximum of emotions in a short time. A person gets into a hopeless situation and desperately tries to get out, and often this happens almost in real time (and the timing of these films, as a rule, rarely exceeds an hour and a half): you start rooting for such a character on a purely physiological level, because some kind of phobia is a fear heights, depths, confined spaces or neurosis about a dead phone – almost everyone has it.

Sometimes these paintings are claustrophobic in the truest sense of the word, such as “Buried Alive” (2010) – here the title speaks for itself. Or the action takes place in open spaces, but this does not help the heroes much, as, say, in “127 hours” (2010), where an extreme rock climber gets stuck in the mountains, or last year’s “Tower”, in which two girls climbed a 600-meter tower , but it was not so easy to get off from there. And of course, a separate subgenre unites stories about survival in the ocean: here we can recall such films as “The Shallows” (2016), “The Blue Abyss” (2017) or the Norwegian “Deep Dive” (2020), which almost imperceptibly passed in the Russian box office. “Underwater Trap” is a remake of the latter, only there two sisters dived to the depths in winter, which further complicated their situation, and in the German tape, depriving it of the remnants of originality, events unfold in a brilliant summer.

Survival thrillers are a well-deserved genre, loved by viewers and filmmakers alike because they allow you to experience maximum emotions with a minimum of funds.

The authors outline the characters of the sisters with a few touches: the elder May (Louise Krause) is serious, responsible and meticulous, the younger Drew (Sophie Lowe) is cheerful, frivolous and, apparently, is used to the fact that all important decisions are made for her by someone else. From a short dialogue at the beginning, it becomes clear that the sisters were once close, but then moved away from each other and hardly communicate. The annual joint trip and scuba diving is their tradition, which allows them to somehow maintain a relationship.

On a lost beach, where, apart from them, there is not a single living soul, Mei carefully checks the equipment, and the girls sink into the depths. Drew rejoices at the familiar, but so exciting sensations, but the older sister is tense and clearly uncomfortable. The younger one tries to call her to a conversation, she closes in on herself, but they do not have time to discuss anything – a rockfall falls into the water. May presses down with a huge stone, attempts to move it are unsuccessful, and now Drew has a whole quest to rise to the surface, call for help, deliver a spare oxygen tank to her sister and do it all very quickly.

Of course, if she succeeded, “Underwater Trap” would be a short film. But since the writers have ninety minutes left to fill, Murphy’s law comes into play, which, as you know, says: if anything can go wrong, it will go wrong. Spare cylinders, sisters’ phones and car keys that they left under a pebble on the shore were filled up by the same rockfall, the trunk in which the jack lies does not open, from the boat that appeared on the horizon, no one notices Drew and does not hear her cries for help, and so on and so forth.

And although all the rules of the game seem to be observed in the film, there is surprisingly no tension in it at all. If in the “Blue Abyss” the situation was enlivened by sharks, then here Mei is tormented by some unclosed gestalts, the roots of which go back to her and Drew’s childhood, but we will never know what happened between the sisters. At the same time, every minute spent on another flashback takes up precious time to save Mei, and at the same time pulls the film to the bottom.