Freediving at the heart of Netflix's documentary “Deep Inside”

HURRY — In the first minutes of “At the Most “Deep,” an amphibious drone follows diver Alessia Zecchini as she descends a hundred meters into the dark depths of the ocean and then rises back up. All in the space of a single breath.

The three-and-a-half-minute sequence, which sends you racing and triggers bouts of claustrophobia, is as difficult to watch as it is hypnotic.

As Alessia Zecchini ascends, her body begins to convulse. Rescue divers must bring her to the surface and resuscitate her.

The images may be shocking, but losing consciousness due to a lack of oxygen is common among free divers, athletes in an extreme sport that involves diving as deep as possible without any breathing aid.

“You can watch all the videos in the world and still not be ready to see a human being just faint, like that,” says Laura McGann, the director of the documentary released Wednesday on the Netflix platform worldwide. “It's scary to see.”

In her film, made up of archival footage, interviews and some reconstructions, Laura McGann tries to understand what drives these men and women to risk their lives again and again and to push the limits of human endurance in search of new records.

“Seeing a human being behave like a seal or a dolphin in the water, without an oxygen tank, was like learning that there was a group of people, somewhere in the world, who could fly,” she told AFP.

The documentary focuses on the relationship between diver Alessia Zecchini and Stephen Keenan, a young Irishman who becomes one of the safety specialists in this sport.

Free divers, if they do not actively seek death, do not seem to fear it. In the opening of “Au plus profond”, Alessia Zecchini happily explains that she does not even think about it.

But the viewer quickly understands that a tragedy has occurred.

Neither the diver nor Stephen Keenan give interviews for the film, leaving the question of their fate hanging for almost the entire feature—except in the case of a quick internet search.

This narration was criticized by the director during the first feedback on the occasion of the Sundance Film Festival, in January.

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But Laura McGann had “very early” decided that her documentary would remain “in the present moment” with her characters throughout their odyssey.

Death “would always be found towards the end of the film”.

“In the Deepest” is the latest in a series of recent documentaries that explore dangerous obsessions through the prism of a love story.

Nominated for an Oscar last year, “Fire of Love” chronicled the risky daily lives of French volcanologists Katia and Maurice Krafft.

And in 2019, “Free Solo” followed climber Alex Honnold as he climbed El Capitan without a belay system, and showed his terrified girlfriend.

For Laura McGann, the relationship between Zecchini and Keenan was one of “yin and yang,” as if they were “each other's missing piece,” even before they met as celebrities in the small world of freediving.

The sport, as cerebral as it is physical, demands a very particular type of personality, one who not only remains calm but also appreciates to find oneself at a depth of 100 m, where one can no longer be rescued.

“What the freediver feels is almost the opposite of what” those watching the documentary feel, McGann explained.

While viewers may find themselves taking a breath just watching, the divers evoke “a serene, calm, peaceful silence” as they quiet their minds and reduce their heart rate to “that of a Tibetan monk.”

“It's almost a meditative state,” McGann described.

But you have to keep a little bit of your subconscious focused on what you're doing, enough to remind yourself to come up.”

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