The Abyss - Avgrunden (2023) – dir Richard Holm
Not the 1989 James Cameron deep-sea film, but a more recent Swedish disaster movie. A mining town in northern Sweden is at risk of sinking into a massive cave inadvertently opened up by the mine. The main character is Frigga (Tuva Novotny) the mine's head of security. I think her title may be mistranslation by Netflix's subtitle writers as her job seems more Head of Safety than Security to me. But anyway, she monitors the relatively mild, but frequent, earth tremors that the mining triggers and it is her job to make the call on if / when particular operations should be halted. Some parts of the town are already being relocated to a safer nearby site as there are cracks in the ground starting to appear. Some areas are fenced off, but, of course, the local high school kids go into those areas anyway. Shortly after the film begins it all starts to get worse, much worse. Novotny is good in the lead role and the support includes Peter Frantzen, probably most well known as King Harald Finehair in Vikings. It's not like a big Holywood disaster movie. There's much less of the special effects and more about the acting and plot. But the special effects it does have are impressive. They make massive cracks appear in the road and have cars slowly sinking into the ground. There's some good, scary underground scenes too and early on this is probably not a film for anyone who is claustrophobic. Rather than the usual one big disaster with a ever diminishing group of survivors eventually escaping, it's more a series of mini-disasters that Frigga and her colleagues / family have to deal with.
8 / 10
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