Survival thrillers are supposed to make you sit on the edge of your seat, leave you gripping onto the nearest surface with sweaty palms, all while the threat of heart palpitations loom in the background. It’s not a feat a huge number of the genre’s entries can accomplish, but 2020’s Breaking Surface pulled it off in style.
The fairly routine plot finds two half-sisters taking their annual trip to go winter diving in the northern part of Norway, but disaster strikes when one of them gets trapped against the ocean floor 30 meters before the surface. With nobody around for miles to lend assistance, Moa Gammel’s Ida is left with no other choice but to embark on a perilous rescue mission that stands every chance of yielding a 100 percent mortality rate.
Simple, efficient filmmaking done incredibly well, Breaking Surface was bestowed with the honor of a perfect 100 percent critical approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes, even if it didn’t make much of a splash outside of its native shores. However, that could be a bout to change in a major way, now that FlixPatrol has outed director Joachim Hedén breathless tale as one of the top-viewed titles on ViaPlay this weekend.
Streaming subscribers have repeatedly shown a preference for nail-biting stories of adversity that plunge everyday people into a battle against insurmountable odds, and Breaking Surface has additionally benefited from the rare accolade of not a single critic on the aggregation site having a bad word to say about it.
