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  • Member Since: June 10, 2021

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    The Deep
    With his highly acclaimed debut film “101 Reykjavik” in 2000, the Icelandic director Baltasar Kormákur caused a sensation not only in his home country but also internationally. For the Icelandic-American co-production "A Little Trip To Heaven" he was able to gather well-known names such as Julia Stiles and Forest Whitaker in front of the camera in 2005. In Watch free movies , Kormákur has already climbed the next step on the corporate ladder and can work regularly in the Hollywood dream factory. Nevertheless, he remains true to his homeland and so returned to Iceland between the Mark Wahlberg action thrillers “Contraband” and “2 Guns”. There he filmed the true story of a fisherman who miraculously survived a tragic shipwreck with "The Deep". The Icelandic Oscar nomination for Best Foreign Language Film 2013 is far more than a high-tension drama.

    The Westman Islands in 1984: Gulli (Ólafur Darri Ólafsson) and his fellow sailors set sail on a fishing boat with a good hangover. But what begins as a routine soon ends in a catastrophe: the cutter capsizes, five of the six sailors die immediately or freeze to death in the icy waters after a short time. Only Gulli survives and swims back to the coast in a superhuman act. The corpulent fisherman spends around six hours in the icy water and then drags himself for kilometers over the sharp-edged lava rocks of the Westman Islands. The local fishermen can hardly believe the story of Gulli's survival, and science soon becomes interested in the case too.

    Dramaturgically, “The Deep” is divided into three parts: First, Kormákur draws his protagonist and his milieu in brief scenes, with the opening scene in the harbor pub playing a central role. Here "The Deep" is almost a social drama in which the reality of life on the Westman Islands is sketched with a documentary touch. This part ends when the ship capsizes. “The Deep” is now a thrilling survival drama: the hallucinating gulli in the fight against the tides of the North Atlantic. When the fisherman finally reaches civilization, severely hypothermic and completely exhausted, the final act begins: Kormákur now deals with the reactions to Gulli's survival and his own handling of the “miracle”. When the clumsy-looking man takes part in scientific research in Reykjavik and London, Kormákur shows a good sense of absurd comedy without losing sight of the tragic component of his story.

    This diversity is also reflected on the visual side: With its color-desaturated images and the documentary paintwork, “The Deep” appears extremely realistic, but it also has a poetic-dreamlike feel. Especially in the middle act, in which Gulli's struggle for survival is portrayed, it always turns into the surreal. Then you can see Gulli fantasizing about his life in short scraps of memory. At no time does Kormákur stylize his protagonist as a hero or superman, but rather narrates his miraculous survival in the ice-cold floods in an emphatically objective manner. In “The Deep” there is no pathos and no fanfare for the “seal man”, as the real model was called at the time, because his body fat might have saved his life. The fact that Ólafur Darri Ólafsson (“Reykjavik - Rotterdam”) plays the sedate fisherman with the necessary portion of restraint fits this approach perfectly.

    Conclusion: With “The Deep”, which is based on a true story, the Icelandic director Baltasar Kormákur has succeeded in creating a touching, strongly played and varied drama.

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