Directing: B+
Writing: B+
Cinematography: B
Editing: B+

There’s a clip in The Rescue of a European newscaster saying, “You’d have to have a heart of stone not to be moved by this.” He might as well be talking about this movie itself, which is a bit of an emotional roller coaster—far more than most documentaries. I can think of a couple of other documentaries that were as tense or as suspenseful, rare qualities on their own for the genre, but I’m hard pressed to think of another one that combines those with anxiety, occasional terror, and compassion and relief.

In other words, The Rescue kind of freaked me out. Its co-directors, Jimmy Chin and Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi, are no strangers to documenting extremes: they also co-directed the 2018 film Free Solo, about a guy climbing 3,000 feet up El Capitan with no gear. The Rescue is a better movie, though, because there’s a key difference: the guy in Free Solo was putting his life at risk for the thrill of it. The Rescue tells the story of dozens of people putting their lives at risk to rescue a young soccer team and their coach stranded in mostly flooded caves in northern Thailand.

If you paid any attention to the news at all, you likely heard about this story. The ordeal lasted 18 days, and the 12 young boys and their coach weren’t even found, confirmed still alive, until nine days into that stretch. It was another week before they came up with a horrifying plan, which itself lasted three days, to get them all out of there. In the end, what they were faced a terrible choice: either risk some of their lives, or guarantee that within days they would all drown and die.

I’m not particularly claustrophobic, but . . . damn. So much of this story involves cave divers maneuvering through incredibly tight, water-filled caves, in scenarios I have a hard time imagining I could ever deal with. This is the kind of thing that could make anyone panic. And if you don’t vividly recall the way the story ended in the news, this film quite effectively keeps you on the edge of your seat, sometimes with your heart in your throat.

There has been some criticism of The Rescue because some of the diving footage was reenacted by the actual divers who were there. Why this matters escapes me, and the footage they get from this is used well—it seems logical that they would not have had a camera going in the middle of desperate swimming and crawling through tight underwater spaces with zero visibility. This footage effectively illuminates the big picture, and gives a visual sense of the spaces they were navigating. The Rescue also makes use of rare footage actually taken at the scene, but it makes sense that there would not be enough of it to flesh out a visual representation of these harrowing eighteen days.

The rescue was a truly international effort, fully acknowledging the hundreds of people involved in the rescue. That said, the Chinese get a passing acknowledgment, and The Rescue as a film gives particular focus to the group of cave diving hobbyists, all of them British, Australian or otherwise European, who just happened to have the skills needed in this one instance that no one else had. At least, that’s the way this movie presents the story. I’m a little unsure of the necessity of featuring three or four of the recreational cave divers talking about being bullied as kids, but, whatever.

There’s a ton of detail to this story, with many twists and turns, over an increasingly hopeless amount of time, with an astonishing conclusion. There are also many angles from which to approach this story, and The Rescue covers a lot of them, weaving them together with its own assured skill. There’s not much more you could ask of a film of this sort.

Overall: B+