In “Black Sea,” the newest film from Scottish director Kevin MacDonald (“The Last King of Scotland”), the director turns out a movie that departs from its initial action-adventure premise in an interesting way. Instead, the film becomes a claustrophobic thriller in a literally tight space.
Jude Law (“Sky Captain”), sporting a balding head, bulking muscles and a thick Scottish accent, stars as Robinson, a former British navy man whose devotion to a life at sea has cost him his marriage and his son. When he is unceremoniously fired from the private company he has been working for, he desperately accepts a mission from a mysterious benefactor. The mission is to locate a sunken Nazi U-boat in the Russian part of the Black Sea that holds a stockpile of hidden gold potentially worth millions.
Robinson vows to take revenge against their exploiters, gathering a crew of fellow unemployed Russian and British men along with the cowardly American businessman Daniels (Scoot McNairy, “Argo”). To cement the uneasy alliance, he decrees that everyone will have an equal share of the gold. As they descend deep into the murky waters of the Black Sea, tensions start to arise between the Russian and British crew members, politically and culturally, with a sense of mistrust between them. Matters finally come to a head when hot-tempered Fraiser (Ben Mendelsohn, “The Dark Knight Rises”) stabs one of the Russians, and in the ensuing chaos the submarine descends down to the bottom of the sea. Now the crew must work together to survive without being noticed by the Russian navy.
By choosing to film mostly in handheld closeup with eerie blue lighting, MacDonald helps capture the gritty reality that comes with occupying such a tight, compartmentalized environment. This is in part because the film was partially shot on a real submarine, and many of the shots show the rusting age and creaky machinery the crew use to navigate the treacherous waters. The crew might be full of stock characters like the volatile Fraiser, the expert sonar detector Baba (Sergey Veksler, “Sdvig”) and the inexperienced rookie Dobin (Bobby Schofield, “Doctors”), but they all portray weary, working class men very well. Law, for his part, has matured insofar as his acting, infusing Robinson with complexity as his desperation to get the gold begins to put the lives of his crew at risk.
In some ways, “Black Sea” resembles a horror film, as each crew member is either killed via accident or murder, and is often nail-biting in how it creates tension. Overall, despite an ending that might feel a bit disappointing, “Black Sea” is a thriller that definitely deserves to be seen.
