The Deep

The Deep (Djúpið, 2012) is an Icelandic drama from Baltasar Kormákur you can watch online on iFILM. On a freezing night off the island's southern coast, a fishing trawler rolls over and goes down, leaving one man alone in black water. The shore is kilometres of icy ocean away.

It draws on what happened to fisherman Guðlaugur Friðþórsson in the spring of 1984: roughly six hours swimming through water of five or six degrees, the kind that kills an ordinary person in minutes. Ólafur Darri Ólafsson plays him not as a hero but as a tired, heavyset man who simply refused to sink. Reaching land brings no relief either — ahead lies a barefoot walk across jagged volcanic rock and a long trek toward any house.

Doctors later studied his body, trying to work out how he lived; at home they called him the seal man. Kormákur shot this less as a survival spectacle than as a quiet record of stubbornness, the sea filmed without swelling music, almost like documentary footage. If you want a survival story told plainly and in a cold northern key, stream The Deep online on iFILM.