Diving Into the Unknown, a Documentary

If you want to know more about the Finnish divers who recovered the bodies of the Italians, watch Diving Into the Unknown, which is now streaming. It's an 82-minute documentary about young Finnish divers (mainly firefighters) who enjoy cave diving together. In 2014, they dived a long and extremely deep (430 feet) freshwater cave in northern Norway.

Two of them die. An international team of cave divers abandons the attempt to retrieve the bodies from the deepest part of the cave, finding it too dangerous. Despite being prohibited from accessing the cave again, the group made a clandestine expedition in 2016 to the snow-covered land to recover their friends. It's a fly-on-the-wall production.

If you have no experience with cave diving, this movie will freak you out. If you have no experience with deep diving, it will freak you out. But it will make you realize, by comparison, how straightforward it was for the Finns to recover the Maldives' bodies.

Their recovery dives take five or six hours each, such is the distance and depth. It is interesting to see how they talk in a primitive way to each other underwater (the film is subtitled), shouting into their rebreather mouthpieces. (You'll spot a JJ, a rEvo, and an Inspiration.) If you have dived in a confined space, the repeated clanging of their multiple tanks on the cave sides will be familiar. There are light-hearted moments and moments of deep introspection. It's a splendid diving movie.

Released in 2016, it's available on Amazon Prime, Apple TV, YouTube, and other platforms. Watch it.

John Bantin