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Why? That one-word question bobs up more than once in “Freediver,” director Michael John Warren’s often fascinating documentary about Alexey Molchanov, a champion in a sport to which audiences may not have given much thought but won’t soon forget.
Based on a piece by Daniel Riley published in GQ magazine in 2021, the movie begins with an explanatory text block that is pretty much verbatim: “The goal of competitive freediving is simple: go as deep as you can on a single breath and return to the surface without blacking out or dying.” The article mulled the broader human implications of Molchanov’s remarkable breath-holding dives, as well as captured some of the communal bonhomie of Molchanov’s fellow divers. The documentary hews even more closely to Molchanov’s into-the-deep ascendance.
Alexey’s mother, Natalia Molchanova, figures mightily — not just in her son’s backstory but also in the sport itself. A champion swimmer, she and Alexey’s father, Oleg, separated when Alexey was a teen. After their divorce, Natalia didn’t find herself until she discovered freediving in her forties. The film includes excerpts from poems she wrote after this “rebirth,” as a relative deemed it.
Popular on Variety It was a discovery she shared with her son as she began to excel at it. She was a record holder long before Alexey became one. Warren utilizes the story of the mother-and-son bond the way freedivers orient themselves to the main downline as they plunge deeper and deeper.
Home video captures Natalia smiling broadly whether she’s on land or in her wetsuit. In 2015, she vanished while doing a fairly routine dive off the coast of Spain. (Natalia makes a significant albeit posthumous cameo in last year’s equally entrancing documentary “The Deepest Breath,” about freediver Alessia Zecchini.) Natalia haunts “Freediver,” making it both tender and psychologically absorbing. The film is dedicated to her.
As for the younger Molchanov’s early years, the film touches on the unsurprising (he was an exceptional swimmer even as a toddler) and the charming: Before the glinting nickname “machine,” he was called “retriever,” because he was like a puppy around his mother and older divers.
Warren began filming in 2022, the year Alexey was banned from participating in the sport’s vaunted competition called Vertical Blue because of Russia’s war on Ukraine. Sitting in Moscow with his wife, Elena Sokolova, and infant son, Alexey watched as his world records were claimed by other divers.
Much of the documentary’s narrative tension comes from Molchanov’s attempts in 2023 (he was able to compete under a neutral flag) to reclaim those records and a few more by competing in five freediving categories. The 36-year-old sits in a session explaining the rules of each event — variable weight, monofin, bi-fin free immersion and the most treacherous, no-fins — his eyes shining, his enthusiasm tugging sweetly. It’s easy to see why he has successfully launched several self-named diving schools and has plans for more.
Molchanov’s quest takes viewers to some of the most frequented yet far-flung sites for the eclectic pod of competitive freedivers, their families and aficionados of the sport: the Bahamas, Nice, the Caribbean island of Bonaire, Honduras. In the Philippines, an approaching typhoon shortens the time he has to achieve one of his goals. His accelerated attempt underscores how dedicated (or is it reckless?) he can be.
The mix of talking heads and underwater footage (Jeff Louis Peterman’s beckoning cinematography) as well as the occasionally hyped opining about the potential for disaster or triumph delivers the familiar beats of the genre. And yet, “Freediver” has plenty of eloquent flourishes.
Scenes from the natural world offer a meditative respite from the competitive fervor, exploring what else has meaning for Alexey: the health of the oceans. Warren and editor Mohammed El Manasterly fashion fragmented and hallucinatory visions that evoke the blurring consciousness divers may experience when they are about to blackout or when they are in a trancelike calm.
Warren even finds something of a nemesis for his hero: William Trubridge. The record holder in no-fin freediving and founder of the Vertical Blue invitational event was instrumental in getting Molchanov barred from competition in 2022. He had his reasons. On camera, Adam Skolnick, author of “One Breath: Freediving, Death and the Quest to Shatter Human Limits,” points out Trubridge’s seeming conflict of interest: He had held the record for no-fin diving for seven years when Alexey goes after it.
But in a riff that threatens to cast the viewer out of Alexey’s realm, the sportswriter belittles legitimate moral grappling about sports, nationalism and war. His remarks on the impotence of the gesture pokes the viewers who may have already made the uneasy connection between one Alexey — moving freely around the globe, returning home to his wife and child in Moscow — and another Alexei who also starred in a documentary, but seemed to have lived in a very different Russia. It’s a moment that stirs complicated feelings about the hermetically sealed world of the film, and perhaps extreme sports in general. Yet, it doesn’t scuttle this more enduring impression the story of Alexey and Natalia makes.
“Freediver” is now streaming on Prime Video.
