In the final act of Thomas Vinterberg’s fiery retelling of the devastating Kursk submarine disaster of 2000, his fictional protagonist Mikhail Kalekov, played by Matthias Schoenaerts, asks a chilling question. He’s facing the seeming inevitability of death, having left his pregnant wife and three-year-old son on land, stranded on the bottom of the ocean with his surviving shipmates, one of whom was left fatherless when he was also aged three. Kalekov asks him: “What do you remember of your father?” He replies: “Nothing.”
It’s a haunting, hopeless moment in a film that not only stings with sadness but bristles with rage. Like in 2016’s Deepwater Horizon, which told of a similarly waterlogged disaster, there’s frighteningly well-choreographed human tragedy but also an unblinking urgency in holding the feet of those accountable to the fire. In that film it was the callous corporate greed of BP. This time, it’s the inhumane pridefulness of the Russian military.
As we meet Mikhail and his fellow sailors, they’re preparing for a wedding, a final hurrah before they head undersea for a weapons test. As part of a rare naval exercise (the first such to take place in Russia for 10 years), the men then head deep underwater in the Kursk submarine, stacked with a range of other missiles. But after equipment malfunctions, a set of explosions rip through the sub, killing the majority of the crew and sending the rest down to the bottom of the Barents Sea. Siloed in a damaged compartment, the men await rescue while struggling to remain alive.
But above the surface, there are added complications. First, there’s a 16-hour wait for authorities to even find the sub and then when located, there are deep structural issues with the potential mode of rescue, with shoddy, failing equipment making a difficult mission turn desperately impossible.
With inarguably his biggest, most mainstream film to date, Vinterberg has set himself a formidable task. In adapting Robert Moore’s exhaustively researched bestseller A Time to Die with Saving Private Ryan screenwriter Robert Rodat, he’s not only telling the stories of the men on the submarine but their panicked families on land and the bureaucratic idiocy that swirls around them all. He’s also assembling it all within the accessible structure of a disaster film, complete with suspenseful set pieces, tear-jerking speeches and a lead boasting matinee idol looks.
It’s an unlikely lurch toward the multiplex for a director who once co-founded the Dogme 95 movement with Lars von Trier and there are some interesting stylistic choices at play. The most notable, and successful, of these is Vinterberg’s decision to play with the screen ratio, only widening it out when the Kursk is submerged, and elsewhere, he employs intimate camerawork in the scenes between the men both above and below sea level, an independent touch in a broader picture, and some eerily effective views of the water that surrounds the ailing sub. It’s not all quite as effective, however. Given the budget and the ensuing expectations, Kursk exists in that familiar movie universe where Russian characters are played by Belgian, French, German and Swedish actors, all of whom speak English throughout. It’s a price to pay for a wider audience and while initially distracting, it could have been far worse (*coughs* Harrison Ford in K-19 *ends coughing*).
While too often films of this ilk struggle to add depth to the stock character of “waiting spouse”, Rodat’s script gifts Léa Seydoux, playing the wife of Mikhail, a far less passive role. One of the most enraging elements of the film is how poorly the men’s relatives were treated by authorities. They were kept in the dark as well as being openly lied to and Seydoux’s steely concern eventually explodes in an electrifying town hall scene before she delivers a gut-wrenching last act speech. It’s a striking, heartfelt performance and marks some of her best work to date. There’s also a strong turn from Colin Firth who plays real-life British commander David Russell whose attempts to help the rescue mission were rejected. He delivers one of the film’s most poignant moments, struggling to maintain composure in his uniform after finding out some tragic news.
It’s a heartbreaking, troubling film about men whose lives were cruelly deprioritised and whose families remain ever altered as a result. It ends on a note of melancholy but the burning anger also remains, the final scenes tinged with a painful awareness of wounds that may never heal.
