What We Most Long For
A documentary about freediving raises questions about the lure of the mysterious ocean—and about the mysteries of our connections to one another.
Review by Marie Glancy O’Shea
The Deepest Breath, Laura McGann’s documentary now streaming on Netflix, warrants eclectic descriptors: terrifying, exquisite, heartbreaking. It chronicles the lives of people united by an obsession with the extreme sport of freediving, wherein humans descend hundreds of feet into the ocean and return to the surface, without scuba gear, on a single inhalation.
Beyond obvious allusion to this preparatory intake of air, the title evokes so much else. There is the image of a single lungful sustaining a land animal within the abyss of the sea. There is awareness of the sport’s enormous psychological dimension—of competitors’ need to calm their nerves by “taking a deep breath” before plunging into the unknown. This resonance extends to the anxiety endured by everyone who cares about a freediver’s safety, since the sport allows precious little room for error.
There is something else, too. McGann conveys that freediving is a spiritual quest. Her main characters, and many peripheral ones, are seekers. They yearn for something they can’t necessarily articulate, but to which they come closest when plummeting toward a murky, limitless expanse that most humans would do anything in their power to avoid.
Freudians would call it the death drive, and the rise of extreme sports has lent plenty of credence to the theory that humans harbor such a longing. But it would be reductive to leave it at that. I come back again to the title and that word, “breath.” Both the Hebrew ruah, and the Greek pneuma used to translate it in early Scriptures, have simultaneous meanings: “wind,” “spirit,” and “breath.” The freediver’s attraction to the unknowable and immense sea has striking parallels with the pilgrim’s pull toward a Divine that threatens to swallow her whole.
To approach oblivion is effortless; it’s the return to the surface that takes work and willpower.
McGann gives us freedivers describing their experience of the sea, and the theme of irresistible attraction emerges consistently. As a diver goes deeper, negative buoyancy makes descent effortless. “The pressure pushes you down,” says record-setter Alessia Zecchini. “And this is for me the best part. It feels like you are flying. The silence, it’s unique. It’s like being in the last quiet place on earth.” Sports journalist Adam Skolnick likens the “surrender element” of this feeling to a “deep meditation” that the diver must deliberately break in order to begin the hard work of pushing back toward the surface.
Surrender; silence; meditation; an almost magnetic pull away from worldliness: This is mysticism, the quest for communion with the Divine by a path of submission, beginning with acknowledgement of how small and limited the self is. “It is always the ocean, and we are nothing,” declares photographer Kristina Vackova. Cathedrals are designed to be conducive to such thoughts, and diver Kristof Coenen’s description the Blue Hole in Dahab, Egypt—a dive site with an underwater tunnel that is central to the film—makes offhanded reference to religious architecture, calling it “this arch, like a chapel underwater.”
In an interview, McGann herself described going snorkeling at the Blue Hole: “…all of a sudden, the ground just drops out of nowhere. I was looking down at the time and it just fell to 100 meters and all you see is this blast of stunningly bright blue. I remember somebody said to me, ‘The blue just calls you down,’ and I got to see that with my own eyes and feel that in my body.”
Our finite self experiences something in the face of the infinite, something balanced between terror and delight. As the Biblical scholar and Mercy Sister Kathleen Rushton has written, “While Jesus is the human face of God made flesh in our midst, the Spirit is revealed mysteriously as the Breath of God through all creation… images from nature remind us of ‘the otherness’ of the Spirit. They resist human tendencies to domesticate the Spirit.”
In centuries past, pilgrims willingly assumed stupendous physical risks for the chance to experience a divinely charged site or relic firsthand. Religious voyagers routinely traveled to places of unsheltered wilderness, as George Greenia has written: “The many risks of medieval travel included murderous thieves, predatory animals, and deadly weather conditions. The death toll is impossible to calculate.” What force led these travelers to leave homes of relative security and brave unknown dangers for the sake of uncertain rewards? Could it be resistance to the domestication of the Spirit?
Modernity has cushioned us from—or robbed us of—encounters with that “otherness” found in nature, while secularization has done the same to encounters with God. We are left without a language for our yearning—witness the degradation of the vital adjective awesome—and, thus, without a means of making sense of it.
Without necessarily subscribing to any explicit faith, freedivers are moved by a need for profundity in every sense of the word. They are fixated on the fugitive sublime; for them, a “domesticated” spirituality would be meagre ration. To approach oblivion is effortless; it’s the return to the surface that takes work and willpower.
One legendary freediver is revealed to have vanished off the coast of Spain; a body was never recovered. As most fatalities occur near the surface, in the final meters of ascent, we are left wondering whether this diver simply submitted, at last, to the ocean’s allure.
Being a parent is a constant negotiation between the urge to protect and the desire to see your children find fulfillment.
McGann uses astonishing images, from subaquatic to aerial, to capture the sea’s fearsome majesty. Like an undertow, they pull the viewer toward a visceral understanding of freediving as a source of meaning for those who embrace it. But that comprehension can’t dissolve the troubling sense of waste that looms around a sport which has claimed so many young, vigorous lives. This sense is nowhere more stark than when the camera pans over a wall of memorial plaques erected for the more than 100 divers who have perished at the Blue Hole.
Each of these divers, presumably, had families and friends who will never stop mourning them. Even those who manage to emerge unscathed are, in essence, living to imperil themselves another day. If anguish took human form, it would have the etched face of Enzo Zecchini, Alessia’s father. In one scene, he watches her dive in real time via video link. We see his face contort as sonar tracking fails and she remains too deep for safety divers to reach her.
I have more than once heard people talk about taking fewer physical risks once they became parents. I was about to do it, they might say. And then I thought, “I can’t now—I have a child.”
It makes sense: If you lose your life, you can’t fulfill your responsibilities to your children. At the same time, a question niggles: What about our emotional responsibilities toward our parents? When we gamble with our lives, we risk inflicting so much pain on them—it is also their future we’re throwing on the table.
For me, at least, The Deepest Breath is largely about parents and children, and the tension between inspirational ambitions and personal cost. Being a parent is a constant negotiation between the urge to protect and the desire to see your children find fulfillment. Towards the film’s end, a father who has lost his offspring muses, “part of grief is selfish”—seeming to imply that endorsing a son or daughter’s dreams means waiving even the right to wish things had turned out differently, should the worst transpire. (Interestingly, one of the casualties recounted in the film is of a mother whose son is also a freediving champion.)
Certainly some viewers will decide it’s the divers who are the selfish ones, for pursuing risky aspirations with monomaniacal intensity. After all, freedivers are not fighting back an invading army, keeping streets safe, or bringing the Word of God to people in darkness. When there is “a cause” at stake, the grieving parent has a simpler (if nonetheless wrenching) task to integrate their loss into a broader vision of justice, mercy, or some such ultimate good.
Yet The Deepest Breath’s most notable achievement might be how it undercuts any facile judgment about freediving as a pursuit. The quote above from Sister Kathleen Rushton continues by saying that the undomesticated Spirit “is experienced in the depths of human relationships and in the wilderness and beauty of the natural world”: she draws a parallel between the deepest mysteries of human connection and the formidable power of nature. McGann’s film moves us most by setting the poignancy of love and loss against the backdrop of a natural world that beckons, threatens, and coaxes out the superhuman in those who hear its call.
Marie Glancy O’Shea is a writer and editor who has covered culture, finance, and travel for publications including America, The Columbia Journalism Review, and CNN.com. She has written, co-written, and adapted several plays for Manhattan’s New Stage Theatre Company, and is the recipient of an Individual Artists Grant from the New York State Council on the Arts. She lives in the Hudson Valley with her husband and children.
The Deepest Breath was written and directed by Laura McGann and was released on Netflix on July 19, 2023. You can watch it with a subscription to Netflix here.
