The latest from the ever-interesting documentarian Jennifer Peedom – whose oeuvre includes eye-watering productions Sherpa, Mountain, and River – joins a lineage of films about highly adventurous people partaking in dangerous pastimes. I’ve watched many of these films, including Man on Wire, about Philippe Petit’s audacious stroll between the twin towers, and Free Solo, about climber Alex Honnold’s compulsion to live, quite literally, on the edge.
And yet, I can’t recall a scene in any of them that truly explains why these often highly intelligent people risk so much, beyond the usual talk of “feeling alive” or whatever existential itch this sort of thing is meant to scratch. I’ve never felt I really understood any of them or the appeal of what they do.
Nor did I feel I understood this after watching Deeper, an entertaining and quite well-made film focused on a team of cave divers as they explore New Zealand’s Pearse Resurgence cave system, well-known in the diving world for its “potential to be the deepest dived cave in the world.”
These divers include Richard Harris, one of the heroes of the Thailand cave rescue, who famously played a crucial role in anaesthetising the trapped boys so they could be carried safely through flooded tunnels. Perhaps no series of words or images can fully express how a person’s raison d’être can emerge from the alignment of danger and purpose.
In Deeper, Harris (who was played by Joel Edgerton in Ron Howard’s movie Thirteen Lives) describes himself as “definitely not a brave man”, adding humility to his already annoyingly large list of virtues. Harris and his team of “wet mules” – Dr Craig Challen, Ken Smith, Dr Simon Mitchell, Luke Nelson, Dave Hurst, Dave Apperley, John Dalla-Zuanna, and Martyn Griffiths – want, like all deep divers and their supporters, to go farther into the earth’s bowels than anyone before them. This is slightly more complicated than bunging on a diving suit and emailing the Guinness Book of Records. We learn, for instance, about high-pressure neurological syndrome, which causes tremors, cognitive impairment, and other disturbances that worsen with depth, sometimes to the point where divers can barely use their hands.
The group believe they’ve found a workaround by using hydrogen as a breathing gas, prompting the “Hydrogen Expedition” of 2023, in which they decide to deploy themselves as guinea pigs. This daring voyage gives the film its dramatic arc, even though we know the key players survive; they’re right there in the interviews. That’s partly why lines like “this is it, the moment of truth,” and other reflections about nerves and risk don’t land with much oomph. It’s in the storyteller’s best interests to show things going awry, creating friction and anticipation, but Peedom is a classy documentarian – not the kind to manufacture peril for the sake of narrative convenience.
In spatial terms, Deeper pursues the reverse trajectory of Peedom’s cracking Mount Everest doco Sherpa – its verticality pointing downwards, towards the earth’s crust rather than the clouds. One core challenge is that deep diving, which involves navigating pitch black cavernous spaces, doesn’t exactly scream “visually interesting” the way summating Everest does. There are pretty drone shots of lush New Zealand wilderness, but there’s no escaping that much of this film isn’t visually thrilling once the dive begins.
Ultimately, while the team’s voyage is important, it’s likely to mean most to the deep-diving community. More could have been done to communicate its significance to the rest of us. Still, the film remains interesting throughout and creates a sense of adventure – especially for those, like me, whose idea of risk is reheating leftovers twice.
Deeper is in Australian cinemas from 30 October
