James McAvoy and Alicia Vikander in a Wim Wenders movie? Sounds pretty untouchable, but reviews out of TIFF for Submergence haven’t been great at all. In fact, I had forgotten it existed because there has been so little discussion on it. The newly released trailer may get people talking again, and the cast is tough to ignore.
Wenders gets behind the camera for the adaptation of J.M. Ledgard’s book, penned, perhaps unfortunately, by The Last Face writer Erin Dignam. McAvoy plays a British covert agent with Vikander as a bio-mathematician (!?!), who meet and fall in love in France, only to be separated by the demands of their respective careers. Honestly this doesn’t sound like something I’d dig, and the trailer suggests a film that might be really dry despite the presence of McAvoy and Vikander. There’s just something stilted about it. Hopefully I’m wrong.
Here’s the synopsis: James (James McAvoy) is a British agent under the cover of a water engineer, while Danny (Alicia Vikander) is a bio-mathematician working on a deep-sea diving project to explore the origin of life on our planet. On a chance encounter in a remote resort in Normandy where they both prepare for their respective missions, they fall rapidly, and unexpectedly, into each other’s arms and a deliriously wild love affair develops, even though their jobs are destined to separate them. Danny sets off on a perilous quest to dive to the bottom of the ocean. James’s assignment takes him to Somalia, where he is sucked into a geopolitical vortex that puts him in grave danger. Both characters are subject to different kinds of isolation as they pine for each other; their determination to reconnect becomes as much an existential journey as a love story.
Submergence opens April 13th in theaters and VOD.
