134 min | PG-13 | November 23, 2022 | Netflix
Two Syrian sisters flee Damascus and drag a sinking dinghy across the Aegean by swimming it to shore. One of them is an Olympic hopeful who ends up competing under a refugee flag. The story is remarkable, and the movie never stops reminding you.
Yusra and Sarah Mardini are sisters from Damascus. Yusra trains as a competitive swimmer with Olympic ambitions. War tears their city apart and their parents decide the daughters have to run. The film tracks their route through Turkey and across the Aegean, with the crossing of an overloaded dinghy as its defining ordeal. The Swimmers wants to be two stories at once. It is a refugee survival film and a sports underdog film, and it argues that the same girl can be a body on a beach and an athlete with a name.
Nathalie Issa plays Yusra with clenched focus and a swimmer’s appetite for winning. Manal Issa plays Sarah as the reckless older sister who carries the family’s grief in her shoulders. The Issa sisters are sisters in life, and the rivalry between them lands without strain. Matthias Schweighöfer plays Sven, the Berlin coach, with a dry skepticism that thaws into investment. Ali Suliman plays their father Ezzat, a former swimmer who built his daughters into the athletes he never got to be. Ahmed Malek plays the cousin Nizar with a nervous warmth that steadies the road sequences.
Sally El Hosaini directs from a script she wrote with Jack Thorne. The Aegean crossing is the film at full power. El Hosaini shoots it at water level in the dark, with the camera low and the horizon gone, so the sea reads as a wall the swimmers cannot climb. The film cross-cuts the gray open water against the bright chlorine blue of competition pools throughout, a visual rhyme that pays off in the crossing and wears thin everywhere else. Thorne’s script reaches for a swelling line of dialogue at every turning point. The score arrives on schedule to tell you what to feel.
The story is true and it does not need inflation. El Hosaini inflates it anyway, with slow motion, speeches, and music that crowds out the silence. The strongest passages are the ones she lets sit still, the two sisters in the water deciding to get out and push. The film keeps reaching past those moments for a bigger gesture. What survives the reaching is the bond between Yusra and Sarah, which is enough to carry a movie that does not always trust it.