The Deepest Breath Review: The Netflix documentary on free diving is created by A24 Film, a Motive Film and Ventureland production, in association with RAW. It is co-produced by Robert Ford, written and directed by Laura McGann. The documentary has a runtime of about 1 hour and 48 minutes.
The film features Alessia Zecchini, Stephen Keenan, Natalia Molchanova, Homar Leuci, Enzo Zecchini, Adam Skolnick, Kristina Vackova, Francesca Koe Owings, Hanako Hirose, Lily Crespy, William Trubridge, Leigh Baker and several others.
The Deepest Breath Review
The documentary starts with Alessia Zecchini, an Italian freediver and how she followed her passion, getting inspired by her role model Natalia Molchanova. Ever since she was a teen, she knew what she wanted to do and even if nobody understood her dream, she kept going on to realise her goals. On the other hand, was Stephen Keenan, who is described as a curious kid who loved adventures.
But as he grew up, he seemed lost and looking for something that was missing in his life. Wandering from one place to another, going on various dangerous yet adventurous trips, he fell in love with free diving. So much so that Stephen finally settled in Dahab, opening a diving training centre. While he wanted to be the one to free dive into the depths of the ocean but his body wasn’t able to keep up with his ambitions. Thus he diverted towards the safety diver career. It proved to be the right choice and even made him famous when he saved Alexey Molchanova’s life in a competition.
By working in these competitions, he met Alessia in the Bahamas in 2017, when she was aiming to break the world record at Vertical Blue. She wanted to break her role model, Natalia’s record of free diving 100 metres but life doesn’t always go the way one plans. The competitors get 7 dives to make a record and Alessia was not able to reach her goal within the first 5 dives. Seeing how desperately she was putting so much pressure on herself and her body, Stephen stepped in to help.
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Training with Stephen definitely helped her, as she broke the world record by free diving 104 metres on the last day of the competition. This not only brought the two together, but they also started sharing the goal of diving through the Blue Hole in Dahab, Egypt. Their acquaintances share how for the first time, they met a person that saw eye to eye with them. What they didn’t anticipate is the looming danger that comes with their passion for reaching the unknown.
The Blue Hole is already infamous for taking many lives that tried to swim through it. Maybe the couple would have been one of the successful stories if only they didn’t miss each other by seconds. Ideally, Alessia was supposed to dive through the reef arch and would have met with Stephen waiting for her.
But he had a late start and she reached seconds before expected, leading them to not finding each other and diving in the wrong direction. Stephen did catch up to her but couldn’t make it to the surface alive as he lost consciousness while holding his breath for extensive time periods. However, he did make sure to save Alessia’s life till his last breath.
Final Thoughts: The narrative style of the documentary is quite immersive. Even through the archival material, we get a sense of the person and their personality as if we knew them. People who might not be well aware of Alessia or the world of immersive diving might think that both of them met with some tragedy. But the way Alessia appears only towards the ending is like a big revelation and expresses the immense guilt of survival that she still carries, just breaks your heart.
The film also sheds light on the world of dangerous sports where nobody knows which dive will be their last. Yet people strive to test the limits of human ability and make new world records, pushing themselves beyond the deep end.
Rating: 4.5/5
The Deepest Breath is currently streaming on Netflix.
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