The Deep

This unbelievable true story from Iceland dramatises the famous 1984 incident of a fishing trawler that left harbour in heavy seas, capsized in a freak accident and deposited its crew in the North Atlantic swell. While his shipmates swiftly succumbed to the freezing temperatures, one man managed to swim ashore, surviving longer in the water than was thought humanly possible. As we see here, however, this was no super-athlete but a somewhat overweight, decidedly ordinary bloke called Gulli - believably played by burly Olafur Darri Olafsson - who subsequently found himself in a maelstrom of attention from the media and scientific community. Director Baltasar Kormakur (creator of Scandi TV hit Trapped) does a tremendously convincing job of re-creating the confounding circumstances, and takes a thoughtful, even quizzical approach to depicting what it must be like to be touched by the miraculous. The result is a film as uplifting, dramatic and mysterious as the startling events on which it is based.