Black Sea **** Kevin Macdonald helms this tough, skillfully-made submarine thriller starring Jude Law; plunging the depths of the human struggle.

Jude Law plays Robinson, a marine salvage worker, estranged from his family and facing imminent redundancy. Still compelled to provide, Robinson agrees to helm one final salvage mission on an old ex-soviet (Foxtrot-class) submarine in search of a wrecked U-boat full of Nazi treasure. Assembling a team of craggy-looking, pugnacious ex-mariners from Britain and Russia, they agree to split the value of the lucrative haul between them – but as the sub plunges deeper and deeper into the dark abyss of the Black Sea, greed and the fear of death become deadly compounds to a catalyst of tension and insanity amongst the crew.

Macdonald’s film is most effective when it trades on the generic conventions of the ‘submarine film’ – a subgenre that falls somewhere between a high-tension pressure cooker drama and science-fiction – the vast emptiness of the ocean often echoes an environment as inhospitable as the blankness of space. Macdonald masterfully invokes a dark, mephitic, claustrophobic environment where the state of unease stems from the desperation of men being not only trapped in a void but also appearing to be void-like individuals themselves – down-and-out and hopeless – the quest for treasure almost replacing their purpose of existence. Jude Law gives an absorbing and visceral central performance and while his attempt at the Aberdeen accent is occasionally dubious, it is a character detail that manages to fit aptly against Robinson’s granite-hard persona. Supporting performances from Ben Mendelsohn and Michael Smiley also do well to add danger and realism to the proceedings.

Dennis Kelly’s script is tough and efficient but not entirely watertight; the narrative uses ellipsis to omit some of the more unbelievable or “difficult to explain” aspects in the story and while the moments of violence are explosive and dramatic, the character motives are less probable and should be understood more as a trope associated with the horror-inflected style of the piece. 

Occasionally reminiscent of Joe Carnahan’s human endurance picture, The Grey(2011) ,Black Sea manages to draw us into an emotional subtext amidst the frenetic action sequences;  Robinson’s existential crisis of masculinity is centrally engaging and transforms the narrative into something that is more profound and transcendent than its thriller conventions might suggest.