The Rescue

A documentary set in Thailand. June 2018. A football team goes into a cave after training. Twelve boys and a coach. The rain comes early. Water fills the cave and the way out closes. The search begins. Thai navy divers go in and cannot get through. The water is opaque, the passages narrow, the current hard. A call for help goes out. Very few people in the world can do this work. The ones who come are not professional divers. A few amateur cave divers from Britain; they do it as a hobby and most are middle-aged. From there the documentary becomes a technical account. Line, tanks, visibility, dives lasting hours, and getting a little further each time. The boys are found after nine days. All of them alive. The real problem starts there. There is no way to get them out. The boys cannot dive. One who panics kills himself and the diver with him. A doctor proposes an idea. The boys will be sedated. It has never been done and nobody gives it a chance. What the narrative is interested in is not a rescue but a decision: its idea is that a group of people agreed to apply a method with no guarantee at all, and took the responsibility. Most of the footage is real. The Thai navy's recordings and the divers' own recordings are used. Some of it is reconstruction. The production says so plainly. One diver died and the documentary does not skip it. Jimmy Chin and Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi directed. Who it is for: anyone who likes survival documentaries and technical detail. Who it is not for: anyone with a fear of enclosed spaces; the diving footage is genuinely crushing.