THE DEEPEST BREATH -- The Dangerous Sport of Freediving is Evidently Realized in This Beautiful Film

Review by Dan Skip Allen

Credit: Netflix © 2023.

A few years ago, a documentary came out called Free Solo about free climbing cliffs and mountains without a harness. The Deepest Breath is a similar type of documentary, but instead of climbing, it's about freediving — deep diving at depths unlike anything heard of from a normal person's perspective.

This film focuses on two main subjects. The first is Steve Keenan, an Irishman who traveled the world trying to find himself until he landed in Dahab, Egypt, where he started a diving school adjacent to a deep Blue Hole, an 85-foot-deep tunnel. The other person it focuses on is Alessia Zecchini, an Italian young lady who found her love of the water intoxicating. She became a diver at a young age and started in pools, before changing to deep water depths and freediving competitions. These two were destined to meet and become friends due to their love of freediving.

The documentary spans multiple years and various locations, such as Rome, Ireland, the Bahamas, and Greece, in addition to Egypt. Like most films of this nature, it uses archival footage of these people and their families, talking heads of friends, co-workers, and family members discussing these two people, and voice-over from the two main characters and others. All these tricks work in the context of the story the documentary is trying to tell. Filmmaker Laura McCann has been very successful in this regard.

Most of the film surrounds a freediving competition at the Vertical Blue in Homeland, Bahamas.  All the main players in the documentary go here for the competition, including a rival diver named Hanako Hirose from Japan. She pushes Alessia to her limits, while everybody, including Steven — who is a safety diver — is there to watch these feeds of amazing freediving. They hold their breath for an extremely long time while underwater.

If it hasn't been mentioned by me by now, I must say from watching this film I have got a whole new outlook on swimming and diving. This is a very dangerous sport that people have died from and could continue to die weeks or months down the line. The film shows that clearly. One individual who was a record holder vanished while freediving.

This documentary doesn't do everything like many other films like this, though. The director of photography Tim Cragg mixes in beautiful shots of the ocean with all the already existing footage of the underwater sequences. Another aspect I quite liked in the film was the music composed by Nainita Disai. The music went in perfect harmony with the film. Netflix and A24 made a documentary that was much more than just a bunch of Italian subtitles. It was an amazing story with beautiful music and visuals to boot.

The Deepest Breath combined many elements we've seen before in documentaries with some other elements that made the film much better. The story was very engaging, while the claustrophobic and dangerous nature of freediving was very evident and fascinating to me. The writer/director Laura MaCann made a film similar to another documentary that won an Academy Award. If this one is received as well as that, people will be talking about it for a while.

​The Deepest Breath streams on Netflix beginning July 19.

Rating: 3.5/5