Review of Black Sea (2014) by Mark M — 10 Mar 2015

Kevin Macdonald moves from The Last King of Scotland's open African landscapes to Black Sea's cramped interior of a dingy submarine and the pitch black depths of the eponymous sea while retaining a firm grasp on the premise of pitting characters against each other due to elements such as the socio-economic climate and nationalism. Spurred on due his employment being made redundant, Robinson - with his seafaring mate, Blackie (Konstantin Khabenskiy) - is goaded by another former colleague, Kurston (Daniel Ryans), into a risky expedition to retrieve a cargo involving gold that was en route from Stalin to Hitler during the Second World War using a German U-boat that never reached its intended location.

Amidst the existing tension of being spotted by the Russian fleet above them, the crew of the submarine - an even split of Russians and the British - soon bump heads due to their own set of clashing ideals, beliefs and personalities, and things get progressively worse as more wrenches are thrown into the machine with the environmental factors of claustrophobia, greed and paranoia. Black Sea is a stripped down thriller fueled by its down on their luck and disenfranchised characters, and its success is all due to the small scope of the narrative along with how it takes places entirely within the submarine and the abyss of the Black Sea.

Though Ben Mendelsohn's casting more often than not sets off alarm bells ringing due to his typecast role as a ticking time bomb in movies such as Animal Kingdom (2010), Black Sea's casting is nigh perfect as a functional minimalist genre piece given the performance that each actor gives regardless of the weight of their character in the narrative from the cook to the young, inexperienced Tobin (Bobby Schofield) that Robinson brings on-board the vessel and whom the Russians believe to bear an ill-omen.

Having a narrative that is so reliant on the interaction between an all-male cast in a submarine, Black Sea has its fair shares of twists and turns that fuel the story towards its glimmering destination of long forgotten gold bricks and a rogue wave of treacherous human elements that is only ever weighed down by the deliberately slow pacing, the 'ill-casting' of Ben Mendelsohn and a single instance of contrived writing involving said actor's character.