Pressure never quite plumbs the depths

Pressure
2 out of 5 stars (2 / 5)

 

You can tell from its opening moments that Pressure is a film that means business.

Opening with text that warns us about the dangers of deep sea diving – as anyone knows who’s ever seen The Abyss – it manages to strand its crew (read: cast) on the bed of the Somali Basin, almost 700 feet below the surface, within twenty minutes.

The four-man team of engineers is composed of the Jonah-like Engel (Danny Huston), the devout Mitchell (Matthew Goode), the aggressive Hurst (Pressure co-writer Alan McKenna), and cocky twenty-something greaser Jones (Joe Cole).  Cut off from their ship, surrounded by countless tonnes of inky black water, and with oxygen rapidly depleting, they have only a few hours to come up with a plan.

With the diving bell acting as centre piece, Pressure feels more theatrical than overtly cinematic. Each man is given an inevitable monologue – likely about family or the absence of – that attempts to get beneath the surface of the archetype: Hurst’s self-loathing, Jones’ absent father. While the premise suggests an all-male pressure cooker of egos and testosterone, there’s surprisingly little conflict between the quad, despite their disagreements over how to respond to the developing situation.

There are also moments of unlikely heroism (is a rescue without suit, strictly speaking, even possible?), ruthless pragmatism (like knowing when to turn off the air), and MacGyver-esque jury-rigging (one of which leads to a unintentional comedy involving a smack of jellyfish).

Ron Scalpello’s direction, while clear and on-point – two words that also describe Richard Mott’s cinematography – never makes a character of the space, and the film’s script – courtesy of Louis Baxter, Paul Staheli, and McKenna – is too incident-driven to truly build.

Pressure’s dramatic highlight involves what initially seems, terrifyingly, to be a scene straight out of Marathon Man (albeit with added flickering lights and rapid cutting), but the film never achieves that level of terror again. Huston in particular sells Engel’s hauntedness (his tragic backstory is heavily foreshadowed) and Cole is effective in conveying Jones’ rising hysteria, but Pressure neither commits to absolute confinement nor broadens its scope beyond the limits of a Pinewood Studio tank.

Like Benjamin Wallfisch’s faint ambient score, Pressure is content to bubble along efficiently. The film never stamps its own personality on the nuts and bolts of its story and ends up feeling like a watered-down melding of Black Sea and Gravity (the film’s climax manages to recall the conclusions of both).

While entertaining, Pressure never quite plumbs the depths, failing to deliver on the promise of Engels’ opening voice-over – “power, savagery, grace.”

Author: robertmwallis

Graduate of Royal Holloway and the London Film School. Founder of Of All The Film Sites; formerly Of All The Film Blogs. Formerly Film & TV Editor of The Metropolist and Official Sidekick at A Place to Hang Your Cape. Co-host of The Movie RobCast podcast (formerly Electric Shadows) and member of the Online Film Critics Society.

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