107 min | PG | October 8, 2021 | National Geographic Documentary Films
Twelve boys and their soccer coach are trapped miles inside a flooded Thai cave, and the world’s armies cannot reach them. The only people who can are a few retirement-age British men who dive caves as a hobby. The plan to save the kids sounds like a plan to drown them, which is exactly why it works as a film.
The Rescue reconstructs the 2018 effort to free twelve boys and their soccer coach from a flooded cave in northern Thailand. A monsoon traps the Wild Boars team miles inside Tham Luang and rising water seals off every exit. The Thai government mobilizes the navy, the army, and thousands of volunteers, and none of them can dive the flooded passages. The film is about the strange truth that the only people on Earth qualified to attempt the rescue are a handful of middle-aged British men who cave dive for fun. The crisis is enormous. The solution is absurdly small.
Rick Stanton and John Volanthen anchor the film. They are retirement-age Englishmen who discuss death and failure in flat understatement. Stanton calls himself a loner and explains that cave diving rewards men who do not need other people. Richard Harris, the Australian anesthesiologist, carries the hardest section. He agrees to sedate unconscious children and float them through miles of submerged rock, and his on-camera reckoning with that choice gives the film its moral weight. Thanet Natisri, the Thai water engineer diverting the flood above ground, supplies the ticking-clock urgency that the divers underplay.
Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chin direct from a script by Wes Tooke, and they solve the central problem of a documentary about events no camera fully recorded. They blend the divers’ own helmet footage with reconstructions shot in dive tanks, and the seams almost never show. The underwater photography refuses to clean up the conditions. The water stays brown and granular and the visibility drops to nothing, so the audience understands the diving by how little it can see. The sound design isolates the rasp of the regulators and the hiss of exhaled air until the breathing becomes the suspense. Tooke structures the reveal of the sedation plan as the hinge of the film, and the editing withholds that detail until it lands as both rescue and gamble.
The Rescue works as a thriller because it never pretends the outcome is assured. It also works as a portrait of an odd subculture of men who found a use for a skill the world considered pointless. The film keeps its focus on the foreign divers, and the Thai navy SEALs, the volunteers, and the families stay closer to the margins than their contribution deserves. That choice narrows the story, and the film carries the cost of it. What remains is a precise account of how competence and luck pulled thirteen people out of a place that should have killed them. The Rescue treats the result as a miracle and then shows you the mechanics that made it happen.