Black Sea is the kind of movie that’ll probably fly under your radar (or sonar in this case). It’s the story of Jude Law’s Robinson and his quest to haul a lost World War II treasure from a German U-Boat deep under the Turkish sea. Simultaneously, Robinson needs to solve his money woes and reunite his broken family. This is a film that goes in directions that will divide opinions (or perhaps would have, had anyone seen it).
Often a movie such as this, which on a broader scale does not relate to audiences as comfortably as superhero stories, unfortunately won’t draw anywhere near as large an audience. Sadly, this is the downfall of many indie films with a small budget. Sadder still, given that the director at the helm of Black Sea is Kevin MacDonald – the man behind critically acclaimed films like The Last King of Scotland and Touching Void.
It seems that Black Sea can’t really decide which direction it’s setting for the characters, and it unravels the narrative at times. We learn that Robinson has lost his job in marine salvaging. Distressed, he conveniently receives a tip-off regarding a missing stash of gold bars, once believed to belong Adolf Hitler (courtesy of the Russians), and the path to financial success is laid out before him.
With funding from a well-known local millionaire, he soon sets sail with his band of misfits on the path to disharmony from scene one. It’s a path that barely moves from a single location inside a dank, old submarine beneath the Black Sea. This is a horrible place for most of us to imagine, but a great place in which to build dramatic tension.
Jude Law is as masterful as he always is in his dedication and commitment to his role, and the supporting cast, is largely composed of English and Russian actors. Pleasingly, Ben Mendelsohn, the Aussie, is the only outlier, but a talented crop holds its own with star.
Luckily for our boy, Mendelsohn, he has the only other character apart from Robinson to show any kind of depth, growth or development throughout the plot. The rest are relegated to the role of simple devices to drive story elements.
Not a huge amount of money went into advertising this movie, and its not running at the suburban megaplexes. But honestly, Black Sea strikes me as the kind of film that, if it was on free to air TV and it caught your attention, it’d keep you entertained until the credits roll. That certainly happened to me at Palace Cinema.
Black Sea is is properly suspenseful, shot nicely, well casted, and its obvious the filmmakers did their research – opting for realistic scenarios and problems to solve in dire situations that’d shiver the spine of any claustrophobic.
