Film Pick of the Week: Thirteen Lives - review by Yvette Huddleston

Here he tackles the Tham Luang cave rescue in northern Thailand in 2018 when a group of teenage boys and their football coach were trapped underground after flash flooding left them unable to get out of the cave system. A race against time then ensued with the local authorities, Thai Navy Seals and an army of thousands of volunteers trying to divert the rainwater to prevent the thirteen from drowning.

While the tension slowly builds, Howard does not sensationalise any of this. He fills in some back story, giving time to the concerned families waiting for news and raises the emotional stakes through subtle but potent imagery. A particularly memorable example of this is a shot of a line of bikes leaning against the barrier outside the entrance to the cave, hurriedly left there as the boys excitedly ran down into the cave for what was intended to be a quick visit before going on to a birthday party for one of their team members.

Viggo Mortensen and Colin Farrell play retired firefighter Rick Stanton and IT consultant John Volanthen, two specialist amateur British cave divers, both veterans of several successful rescues, who were brought over to assist at the suggestion of Vern Unsworth (played by Lewis Fitz-Gerald), a British national living in Thailand and himself an experienced diver. It was Stanton and Volanthen who first found the group, miraculously still alive – by that time they had been underground for ten days. Mortensen and Farrell are both excellent, dialling down their own star quality, playing decent, ordinary men with great sensitivity and authenticity. They are helped in this by the measured script which eschews any hint of Hollywood heroics.

Once the group has been located the next problem is how to get them back to the surface – the only way out involves a long, complicated underwater swim through narrow tunnels and the divers are concerned that some of the boys might, understandably, panic. So they bring in Australian diver and anaesthesiologist Richard Harris (Joel Edgerton) who suggests an ingenious but risky possible solution.