Some siblings bond over shared childhood joys: fond memories of summer vacations, playing together until the sun goes down, or visits to cherished relatives. Other siblings bond over the shared trauma of growing up in a dysfunctional household. They support each other when no one else will, reassuring each other that what happened to them was terrible and it was real, no matter what the adults in their lives may say. Writer-director Joachim Hedén’s survival thriller Breaking Surface is a tense and heart-wrenching examination of sisterly bonds that are tested by a terrifying diving accident made all the more dangerous by the looming specter of unresolved family wounds.
Ida (Moa Gammel) and Tuva (Madeleine Martin) are half-sisters. Their mother Anne (Trine Wiggen) has always favored the younger Tuva due to an acrimonious divorce from Ida’s father. Anne has never let Ida forget a childhood incident when Tuva nearly drowned in a diving accident that Anne believes was Ida’s fault. The girls are all grown up now, though: Tuva is a professional diver and Ida is facing the dissolution of her own marriage. They meet their mother for a diving trip in Norway, but when their mother is too ill to brave the icy waters, the sisters go out on their own.
From the very first image, there is a cold starkness to Breaking Surface. An opening tracking shot over icy water is beautiful but forbidding, setting a tone of dread that doesn’t let up until the final seconds of the film. Tense early moments foreshadow that the dive will run into trouble: the sisters run across a stranded motorist before they even get to the dive site, and once they arrive rocks start falling from the overhanging cliffs that force them to move their emergency gear to a hopefully safer spot. Ida is rusty — traumatized by the guilt and shame of the childhood accident, she doesn’t dive much these days — so Tuva has to walk her through every step of the dive. At every possible moment, Hedén turns up the pressure while also allowing quiet moments between the sisters to breathe as they come to terms with their very different relationships with their mother.
Shots of the women in the water emphasize how small and vulnerable they are. Whales swim by and make the women look impossibly insignificant, and tight squeezes through underwater caves imbue the film with an eerie claustrophobia that lingers just as much as the icy chill of the film’s blue-grey palette. It feels inevitable when a rockslide pins Tuva to the ocean floor, but that doesn’t make the moment any less heart-stopping. Ida panics, feeling just as trapped as Tuva is when she realizes that her childhood trauma is happening all over again. Her sister is going to drown and it’s all her fault. Tuva remains calm, though, giving Ida methodical instructions on how to get her out. The two sisters work together well, but everything that can go wrong does go wrong. When Ida has to improvise and make grueling choices to save her sister (one of which necessitates a content warning for animal cruelty), Breaking Surface becomes a nail-biting survival story with an unbearably tight ticking clock.
Once again, the sisters must work together through a trauma that has been thrust upon them. Tuva and Ida are very careful in their planning and execution of the dive. They do nearly everything right. But just like their mother’s divorce from her first husband and her subsequent mistreatment of Ida, this accident is not the sisters’ fault; it is simply the hand that fate has dealt them. Both actresses convey the complex familial history between them while also giving the thriller elements a desperate viscerality that leaves viewers breathless.
Hedén crafts a film that shocks, terrifies, and breaks viewers’ hearts. Breaking Surface is at once a terrifying underwater tale of survival and a touching story of sisterly love and connection. Ida and Tuva can’t change their upbringing any more than they control the wind or the tides, but they can forge bonds that are stronger than any of the forces that seek to tear them apart.
