MOVIE REVIEW: KURSK (screening as part of Revelation Film Festival)

Shane | 5 July 2019 | Reply

MOVIE REVIEW: KURSK (screening as part of Revelation Film Festival)
Written by Robert Rodat & Robert Moore
Directed by Thomas Vinterberg
Starring Matthias Schoenaerts, Léa Seydoux, Peter Simonischek, Max von Sydow
Reviewed by Shane Pinnegar
86%

In August 2000 the Russian submarine Kursk was sunk after an unstable torpedo accidentally detonated on board whilst the boat was participating in naval exercises in the Barents Sea.

Thomas Vinterberg’s dramatisation of the shambolic rescue operation is an edge-of-the-seat, nail-biting thriller which grips and fascinates to the bitter end.

The Russian hierarchy are more paranoid about their naval secrets being exposed than the lives of their crew, and initially refuse to allow a British rescue attempt. Meanwhile, the survivors, trapped at the bottom of the sea, struggle to remain calm and keep their wits about them as their oxygen supplies run dangerously low, temperatures plummet, and tempers flare.

The Russian authorities resort to ever-more-bizarre methods to hamper rescue operations, even going so far as to drug distressed family members at a press conference covered by international media. What is perhaps most shocking is that this actually happened.

Featuring superb performances from Matthias Schoenaerts as the ranking officer amongst the naval survivors, Colin Firth as British naval Commodore David Russell and the legendary Max von Sydow as Admiral Vladimir Petrenko, the man who obstructs rescue attempts time and again, Kursk (aka The Command) is a shocking expose of a paranoid regime clutching tightly to the follies of the cold war, at the expense of men’s lives.